How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using CURL in PHP

Question

I'm trying to connect to a Tor hidden service using the following PHP code:

$url = 'http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion/'
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "http://127.0.0.1:9050/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_SOCKS5);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$curl_error = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);

print_r($output);
print_r($curl_error);

When I run it, I get the following error:

Couldn't resolve host name

However, when I run the following command from my command line in Ubuntu:

curl -v --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion

I get a response as expected

The PHP cURL documentations says this:

--socks5-hostname
Use  the  specified  SOCKS5 proxy (and let the proxy resolve the host name).

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

I use Privoxy and cURL to scrape Tor pages:

<?php
    $ch = curl_init('http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion'); // Tormail URL
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "localhost:8118"); // Default privoxy port
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
    curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
?>

After installing Privoxy you need to add this line to the configuration file (/etc/privoxy/config). Note the space and '.' a the end of line.

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

Then restart Privoxy.

/etc/init.d/privoxy restart