Tor Nyx on MacOS

ano /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc

Tor and Nyx (which replaces the anonymizing relay monitor, Arm, as a CLI status monitor for Tor) can be installed on MacOS/OSX using Homebrew, but I initially struggled to figure out how to configure them to work together.

Turns out my /etc/tor/ was in /usr/local/etc/tor/.

Here’s how I got it all up and running:

brew install tor nyx

note:

 To have launchd start tor now and restart at login:
   brew services start tor
 Or, if you don't want/need a background service you can just run:
   tor 

I want to have the Tor proxy available to other apps while I’m logged in to my Mac, so I start Tor as a brew/launchd service.

brew services start tor

Create a torrc configuration file from the sample provided.

cp /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc.sample /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc

Open the Tor ControlPort so Nyx can talk to Tor.
Edit the torrc file and remove the comment mark (#) from the ControlPort line.

nano /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc
  ControlPort 9051 

It is recommended that you enable an authentication method if you open the ControlPort, so I also uncomment the CookieAuthentication option a few lines below.

  CookieAuthentication 1 

Save/WriteOut the file, exit the editor, and run Tor or restart the Homebrew service if you started it that way already.

tor

or

brew services restart tor

Then you should be able to run Nyx to monitor your Tor node.

nyx

You can now edit your torrc file further if you want to run a Tor relay, exit node or hidden service, or to modify any of Tor’s other configuration options, or you can use the Configuration Editor in Nyx.

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