[tor-dev] Embedding tor in an application and using tor without opening a port

[Nick Mathewson]

On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Navin Francis
<navin.kurupacheril at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are there any existing applications that embed tor in this manner?

This is pretty much unsupported for the reasons discussed in
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2010-November/002141.html
and
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-September/021529.html
among others.

My preferred approach for applications that want to include their own
Tor would be to have a library (perhaps based on Torsocks) that
handles making connections over Tor, plus maybe another library that
would find a running Tor or launch one as needed. That way we wouldn't
have a huge pile of apps all stuck downloading their own directory
information, and we wouldn't wind up with a bunch of forked Tor
versions all diverging independently.

Nonetheless, people keep wanting to do it the way you suggest, and
it's free software, so do what you like.

best wishes,
--
Nick