How to make urllib2 requests through Tor in Python?

I'm trying to crawl websites using a crawler written in Python. I want to integrate Tor with Python meaning I want to crawl the site anonymously using Tor.

I tried doing this. It doesn't seem to work. I checked my IP it is still the same as the one before I used tor. I checked it via python.

import urllib2
proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"tcp":"http://127.0.0.1:9050"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_handler)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

You are trying to connect to a SOCKS port - Tor rejects any non-SOCKS traffic. You can connect through a middleman - Privoxy - using Port 8118.

Example:

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http" : "127.0.0.1:8118"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support) 
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
print opener.open('http://www.google.com').read()

Also please note properties passed to ProxyHandler, no http prefixing the ip:port

pip install PySocks

Then:

import socket
import socks
import urllib2

ipcheck_url = 'http://checkip.amazonaws.com/'

# Actual IP.
print(urllib2.urlopen(ipcheck_url).read())

# Tor IP.
socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, '127.0.0.1', 9050)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
print(urllib2.urlopen(ipcheck_url).read())

Using just urllib2.ProxyHandler as in https://stackoverflow.com/a/2015649/895245 fails with:

Tor is not an HTTP Proxy

Mentioned at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2317849/how-can-i-use-a-socks-4-5-proxy-with-urllib2

Tested on Ubuntu 15.10, Tor 0.2.6.10, Python 2.7.10.

The following code is 100% working on Python 3.4

(you need to keep TOR Browser open wil using this code)

This script connects to TOR through socks5 get the IP from checkip.dyn.com, change identity and resend the request to get a the new IP (loops 10 times)

You need to install the appropriate libraries to get this working. (Enjoy and don't abuse)

import socks
import socket
import time
from stem.control import Controller
from stem import Signal
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
err = 0
counter = 0
url = "checkip.dyn.com"
with Controller.from_port(port = 9151) as controller:
    try:
        controller.authenticate()
        socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 9150)
        socket.socket = socks.socksocket
        while counter < 10:
            r = requests.get("http://checkip.dyn.com")
            soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
            print(soup.find("body").text)
            counter = counter + 1
            #wait till next identity will be available
            controller.signal(Signal.NEWNYM)
            time.sleep(controller.get_newnym_wait())
    except requests.HTTPError:
        print("Could not reach URL")
        err = err + 1
print("Used " + str(counter) + " IPs and got " + str(err) + " errors")

Using privoxy as http-proxy in front of tor works for me - here's a crawler-template:

import urllib2
import httplib




from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from time import sleep




class Scraper(object):
def init(self, options, args):
if options.proxy is None:
options.proxy = "http://localhost:8118/"
self._open = self._get_opener(options.proxy)



def _get_opener(self, proxy):
    proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': proxy})
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_handler)
    return opener.open

def get_soup(self, url):
    soup = None
    while soup is None:
        try:
            request = urllib2.Request(url)
            request.add_header('User-Agent', 'foo bar useragent')
            soup = BeautifulSoup(self._open(request))
        except (httplib.IncompleteRead, httplib.BadStatusLine,
                urllib2.HTTPError, ValueError, urllib2.URLError), err:
            sleep(1)
    return soup




class PageType(Scraper):
_URL_TEMPL = "http://foobar.com/baz/%s"



def items_from_page(self, url):
    nextpage = None
    soup = self.get_soup(url)

    items = []
    for item in soup.findAll("foo"):
        items.append(item["bar"])
        nexpage = item["href"]

    return nextpage, items

def get_items(self):
    nextpage, items = self._categories_from_page(self._START_URL % "start.html")
    while nextpage is not None:
        nextpage, newitems = self.items_from_page(self._URL_TEMPL % nextpage)
        items.extend(newitems)
    return items()
    




pt = PageType()
print pt.get_items()
pt = PageType()
print pt.get_items()

Here is a code for downloading files using tor proxy in python: (update url)

import urllib2

url = "http://www.disneypicture.net/data/media/17/Donald_Duck2.gif"

proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': '127.0.0.1:8118'})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

file_name = url.split('/')[-1]
u = urllib2.urlopen(url)
f = open(file_name, 'wb')
meta = u.info()
file_size = int(meta.getheaders("Content-Length")[0])
print "Downloading: %s Bytes: %s" % (file_name, file_size)

file_size_dl = 0
block_sz = 8192
while True:
    buffer = u.read(block_sz)
    if not buffer:
        break

    file_size_dl += len(buffer)
    f.write(buffer)
    status = r"%10d  [%3.2f%%]" % (file_size_dl, file_size_dl * 100. / file_size)
    status = status + chr(8)*(len(status)+1)
    print status,

f.close()

Update - The latest (upwards of v2.10.0) requests library supports socks proxies with an additional requirement of requests[socks].

Installation -

pip install requests requests[socks]

Basic usage -

import requests
session = requests.session()
# Tor uses the 9050 port as the default socks port
session.proxies = {'http':  'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050',
                   'https': 'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050'}

# Make a request through the Tor connection
# IP visible through Tor
print session.get("http://httpbin.org/ip").text
# Above should print an IP different than your public IP

# Following prints your normal public IP
print requests.get("http://httpbin.org/ip").text

---

Old answer - Even though this is an old post, answering because no one seems to have mentioned the requesocks library.

It is basically a port of the requests library. Please note that the library is an old fork (last updated 2013-03-25) and may not have the same functionalities as the latest requests library.

Installation -

pip install requesocks

Basic usage -

# Assuming that Tor is up & running
import requesocks
session = requesocks.session()
# Tor uses the 9050 port as the default socks port
session.proxies = {'http':  'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050',
                   'https': 'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050'}
# Make a request through the Tor connection
# IP visible through Tor
print session.get("http://httpbin.org/ip").text
# Above should print an IP different than your public IP
# Following prints your normal public IP
import requests
print requests.get("http://httpbin.org/ip").text

The following solution works for me in Python 3. Adapted from CiroSantilli's answer:

With urllib (name of urllib2 in Python 3):

import socks
import socket
from urllib.request import urlopen
    
url = 'http://icanhazip.com/'

socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, '127.0.0.1', 9150)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket

response = urlopen(url)
print(response.read())

With requests:

import socks
import socket
import requests
    
url = 'http://icanhazip.com/'

socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, '127.0.0.1', 9150)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket

response = requests.get(url)
print(response.text)

With Selenium + PhantomJS:

from selenium import webdriver

url = 'http://icanhazip.com/'

service_args = [ '--proxy=localhost:9150', '--proxy-type=socks5', ]
phantomjs_path = '/your/path/to/phantomjs'

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(
    executable_path=phantomjs_path, 
    service_args=service_args)

driver.get(url)
print(driver.page_source)
driver.close()

Note: If you are planning to use Tor often, consider making a donation to support their awesome work!

Perhaps you're having some network connectivity issues? The above script worked for me (I substituted a different URL - I used http://stackoverflow.com/ - and I get the page as expected:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd" >
 <html> <head>

<title>Stack Overflow</title>        
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/content/all.css?v=3856">

(etc.)

Tor is a socks proxy. Connecting to it directly with the example you cite fails with "urlopen error Tunnel connection failed: 501 Tor is not an HTTP Proxy". As others have mentioned you can get around this with Privoxy.

Alternatively you can also use PycURL or SocksiPy. For examples of using both with tor see...

https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/to_russia_with_love.html

you can use torify

run your program with

~$torify python your_program.py

Thought I would just share a solution that worked for me (python3, windows10):

Step 1: Enable your Tor ControlPort at 9151.

Tor service runs at default port 9150 and ControlPort on 9151. You should be able to see local address 127.0.0.1:9150 and 127.0.0.1:9151 when you run netstat -an.

[go to windows terminal]
cd ...\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor
tor --service remove
tor --service install -options ControlPort 9151
netstat -an 

Step 2: Python script as follow.

# library to launch and kill Tor process
import os
import subprocess

# library for Tor connection
import socket
import socks
import http.client
import time
import requests
from stem import Signal
from stem.control import Controller

# library for scraping
import csv
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time

def launchTor():
    # start Tor (wait 30 sec for Tor to load)
    sproc = subprocess.Popen(r'.../Tor Browser/Browser/firefox.exe')
    time.sleep(30)
    return sproc

def killTor(sproc):
    sproc.kill()

def connectTor():
    socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 9150, True)
    socket.socket = socks.socksocket
    print("Connected to Tor")

def set_new_ip():
    # disable socks server and enabling again
    socks.setdefaultproxy()
    """Change IP using TOR"""
    with Controller.from_port(port=9151) as controller:
        controller.authenticate()
        socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 9150, True)
        socket.socket = socks.socksocket
        controller.signal(Signal.NEWNYM)

def checkIP():
    conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("icanhazip.com")
    conn.request("GET", "/")
    time.sleep(3)
    response = conn.getresponse()
    print('current ip address :', response.read())

# Launch Tor and connect to Tor network
sproc = launchTor()
connectTor()

# list of url to scrape
url_list = [list of all the urls you want to scrape]

for url in url_list:
    # set new ip and check ip before scraping for each new url
    set_new_ip()
    # allow some time for IP address to refresh
    time.sleep(5)
    checkIP()

    '''
    [insert your scraping code here: bs4, urllib, your usual thingy]
    '''

# remember to kill process 
killTor(sproc)

This script above will renew IP address for every URL that you want to scrape. Just make sure to sleep it long enough for IP to change. Last tested yesterday. Hope this helps!

To expand on the above comment about using torify and the Tor browser (and doesn't need Privoxy):

pip install PySocks
pip install pyTorify

(install Tor browser and start it up)

Command line usage:

python -mtorify -p 127.0.0.1:9150 your_script.py

Or built into a script:

import torify
torify.set_tor_proxy("127.0.0.1", 9150)
torify.disable_tor_check()
torify.use_tor_proxy()

# use urllib as normal
import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request("http://....")
req.add_header("Referer", "http://...") # etc
res = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
html = res.read().decode("utf-8")

Note, the Tor browser uses port 9150, not 9050