Integrating Tor into OpenBazaar Natively

[hoffmabc]

Over the last few days I've done some research and experimentation on getting Tor bundled with OpenBazaar so that users don't have to use an external install/config or Tor Browser Bundle to connect OpenBazaar to the Tor network. I had some success using https://github.com/cretz/tor-static to build a static binary for Tor and then control it using https://github.com/cretz/bine on OS X. It also builds and works on Linux. Unfortunately on Windows this is not the case and we cannot simply build it and bundle there. So the following is my proposal for how we go about doing this.

Linux / OS X:

• Build static Tor binaries in the build process (Travis)
• Use the embedded library (bine) to start Tor
• Connect through embedded Tor without control port

Windows

If user starts the server with Tor setting enabled then we would:

• Grab pre-built Tor binary that we build and store in the cloud (AWS?) and put somewhere we can run it
• Verify the binary
• If not already created, setup .torrc file in data directory <OB_DATA_DIR>/tordata/.torrc
• Start Tor binary
• Connect to Tor through the control port like we normally do with Tor Browser Bundle