Installing Tor

First, install the tor package from your distribution’s package manager.

For Arch-based distros:

sudo pacman -S tor

Start tor.

systemctl start tor

Check tor status (wait for Bootstrapped 100% (done): Done)

journalctl -exft Tor

If it does not reach 100% and displays errors. This might be because tor traffic is blocked in your area. You probably need to use a bridge. You can get a bridge from the tor project official site.

Inside the TOR config file /etc/tor/torrc, I use an obfs4 bridge. You will need to install the obfs4proxy package for your distro.

UseBridges 1 
ClientTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy

Bridge BRIDGE-LINE-1
Bridge BRIDGE-LINE-2

Now, start tor again and observe the status. It should be up and running. To forward traffic through it, there are multiple options.

Forwarding traffic through tor

1. Tor’s built-in HTTP CONNECT tunnel.

This is Tor’s official way of doing it. Also, It is the method I use the most. Note that this is not a full HTTP Proxy. It is just an HTTP CONNECT tunnel. RTFM (Read The Fantastic Manual).

You only need to add this line to /etc/tor/torrc. Make sure no other app is using your specified port.

HTTPTunnelPort 127.0.0.1:8118

Use the following environment variable or configure proxy settings in your apps, if it exists.

https_proxy="127.0.0.1:8118"

This method does not support HTTP traffic without TLS. You will need to only use HTTPS.

To test it in a terminal, run this command:

https_proxy="127.0.0.1:8118" curl https://check.torproject.org/

If you get the page response (HTML document), your connection was successful. Note that I am enforcing HTTPS because otherwise it wouldn’t work.

2. Using an HTTP Proxy like privoxy or proxychains.

Install privoxy.

sudo pacman -S privoxy

Inside privoxy config /etc/privoxy/config, uncomment this line:

forward-socks5 / localhost:9050 .

Start privoxy.

systemctl start privoxy

Use the following environment variables or configure proxy settings in your apps, if it exists.

http_proxy="127.0.0.1:8118"
https_proxy="127.0.0.1:8118"

To test if it works, you can try this in your terminal:

http_proxy="127.0.0.1:8118" curl check.torproject.org

If you get an instant 301 Moved Permanently response, your connection was successful.

I won’t bother with proxychains because it does not have support for proxying apps that use 32-bit libraries (like Steam and Java). You need to build a 32-bit proxychains yourself. See this github issue. However, If you want to use proxychains, you should edit the config file in /etc/proxychains.conf and append proxychains to any command in the terminal.

proxychains firefox