[php] How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using cURL in PHP?

TL;DR: Set CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE to use CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME if you have a modern PHP, the value 7 otherwise, and/or correct the CURLOPT_PROXY value.

As you correctly deduced, you cannot resolve .onion domains via the normal DNS system, because this is a reserved top-level domain specifically for use by Tor and such domains by design have no IP addresses to map to.

Using CURLPROXY_SOCKS5 will direct the cURL command to send its traffic to the proxy, but will not do the same for domain name resolution. The DNS requests, which are emitted before cURL attempts to establish the actual connection with the Onion site, will still be sent to the system's normal DNS resolver. These DNS requests will surely fail, because the system's normal DNS resolver will not know what to do with a .onion address unless it, too, is specifically forwarding such queries to Tor.

Instead of CURLPROXY_SOCKS5, you must use CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME. Alternatively, you can also use CURLPROXY_SOCKS4A, but SOCKS5 is much preferred. Either of these proxy types informs cURL to perform both its DNS lookups and its actual data transfer via the proxy. This is required to successfully resolve any .onion domain.

There are also two additional errors in the code in the original question that have yet to be corrected by previous commenters. These are:

  • Missing semicolon at end of line 1.
  • The proxy address value is set to an HTTP URL, but its type is SOCKS; these are incompatible. For SOCKS proxies, the value must be an IP or domain name and port number combination without a scheme/protocol/prefix.

Here is the correct code in full, with comments to indicate the changes.

<?php
$url = 'http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion/'; // Note the addition of a semicolon.
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "127.0.0.1:9050"); // Note the address here is just `IP:port`, not an HTTP URL.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME); // Note use of `CURLPROXY_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME`.
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$curl_error = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);

print_r($output);
print_r($curl_error);

You can also omit setting CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE entirely by changing the CURLOPT_PROXY value to include the socks5h:// prefix:

// Note no trailing slash, as this is a SOCKS address, not an HTTP URL.
curl_setopt(CURLOPT_PROXY, 'socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050');

Examples related to php

I am receiving warning in Facebook Application using PHP SDK Pass PDO prepared statement to variables Parse error: syntax error, unexpected [ Preg_match backtrack error Removing "http://" from a string How do I hide the PHP explode delimiter from submitted form results? Problems with installation of Google App Engine SDK for php in OS X Laravel 4 with Sentry 2 add user to a group on Registration php & mysql query not echoing in html with tags? How do I show a message in the foreach loop?

Examples related to curl

What is the incentive for curl to release the library for free? curl: (35) error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number Converting a POSTMAN request to Curl git clone error: RPC failed; curl 56 OpenSSL SSL_read: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL, errno 10054 How to post raw body data with curl? Curl : connection refused How to use the curl command in PowerShell? Curl to return http status code along with the response How to install php-curl in Ubuntu 16.04 curl: (35) SSL connect error

Examples related to proxy

Axios having CORS issue Running conda with proxy WebSockets and Apache proxy : how to configure mod_proxy_wstunnel? "Proxy server connection failed" in google chrome Set proxy through windows command line including login parameters Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':classpath' Problems using Maven and SSL behind proxy Using npm behind corporate proxy .pac git returns http error 407 from proxy after CONNECT Forwarding port 80 to 8080 using NGINX

Examples related to tor

How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using cURL in PHP?