Install tor with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• tor
• tor-gencert
• tor-print-ed-signing-cert
• tor-resolve
• torify

Project history

Tor descends from onion routing research at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. The Tor Project's official history says David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson began onion routing work in 1995 to avoid revealing who was communicating with whom, even to a network observer.

In the early 2000s, Roger Dingledine began working with Paul Syverson on an NRL onion-routing project; Nick Mathewson joined soon after. The name Tor distinguished this project from other onion-routing work and originally stood for The Onion Routing.

The Tor network was initially deployed in October 2002 under a free and open software license. By the end of 2003, the network had about a dozen volunteer nodes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation began funding Dingledine and Mathewson's work in 2004, and The Tor Project, Inc. was founded in 2006 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to maintain development.

Tor's history is also a history of making anonymity usable. The project developed bridges starting in 2007 to help users get around censorship, Tor Browser development began in 2008, and Tor Project history identifies the Arab Spring and the 2013 Snowden revelations as major moments in wider public awareness and use.

Adoption history

The official history says Tor grew from about a dozen volunteer nodes in 2003 to thousands of volunteer-run relays and millions of users worldwide. Its adoption has spanned privacy-conscious technologists, activists, journalists, researchers, relay operators, and users in censored networks.

The input package facts show the core tor daemon packaged broadly across Unix-like and cross-platform package ecosystems, including Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/dnf, Arch/pacman, Nix, MacPorts, Chocolatey, Scoop, apk, and zypper. That packaging breadth is part of how relay operators, researchers, and CLI users install the daemon outside Tor Browser.

How it is used

As a package, tor is used to run the local Tor daemon, operate relays and bridges, provide a SOCKS proxy for local applications, and support tools such as tor-resolve and torify. The core README points users to Tor source releases, verification instructions, support documentation, and relay documentation.

For package-nerd workflows, tor is not just an application but a service dependency and network substrate. Users install it from package managers to run background daemons, manage torrc configuration, expose local SOCKS ports, build source releases, test hidden/onion service behavior, and support relay or bridge operations from ordinary Unix service managers.

Why package nerds care

Tor is one of the canonical privacy/networking packages in Unix package ecosystems. It exposes the distinction between the Tor network, the tor daemon, Tor Browser, relay operation, onion services, SOCKS proxying, pluggable transports, and wrapper tools such as torsocks, making it a central package for privacy-aware CLI users and network engineers.

The package is also significant because it turns a global volunteer anonymity network into something operators can install, configure, verify, and supervise with familiar package-manager and service-manager tools.

Timeline

• 1995: Onion routing research begins at the U.S. Naval Research Lab.
• October 2002: The Tor network is initially deployed and released under a free and open software license.
• 2003: The network has about a dozen volunteer nodes by year end.
• 2004: The Electronic Frontier Foundation begins funding work on Tor.
• 2006: The Tor Project, Inc. is founded as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
• 2007: The project begins developing bridges to help users bypass censorship.
• 2008: Development of Tor Browser begins.
• 2010-2011: Tor is identified by the project as an important tool during the Arab Spring.
• 2013: Snowden revelations increase mainstream concern about mass surveillance and public awareness of tools like Tor.

Related projects

• Related official Tor Project surfaces include Tor Browser, relay and bridge documentation, onion services, the Tor specifications site, torsocks, and newer related isolation work such as oniux.

Sources

• https://community.torproject.org/relay/
• https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/raw/main/README.md
• https://www.torproject.org/about/history/
• source_facts.package-manager