Installation

Install hypertor for Rust or Python: feature flags, TLS backends, platform notes and building from source.

Rust

cargo add hypertor
cargo add tokio --features full

Minimum supported Rust version: 1.91, which is what arti 0.45 requires. hypertor cannot build on anything older, so it declares that floor rather than a friendlier-looking one that would fail deep inside a dependency.

Feature flags

There is no python feature; see Building from source below.

# Client and onion service hosting
cargo add hypertor --features server

# Everything
cargo add hypertor --features full

Choosing a TLS backend

rustls is the default and the right choice for almost everyone. See Security for why.

Exactly one TLS backend is required, and not because of https:// — Tor’s own link protocol is TLS, so even a server-only build that never makes an outbound request needs one. If you turn default features off, remember to put one back:

# Wrong: fails to compile.
cargo add hypertor --no-default-features --features server

# Right.
cargo add hypertor --no-default-features --features server,rustls

hypertor says so directly at compile time. It used to fail a crate away with unresolved import tor_rtcompat::PreferredRuntime, which names neither the cause nor the fix.

The crypto provider is aws-lc-rs, which is rustls’s own default, the provider arti uses for Tor link TLS, and the only one of the two that offers post-quantum key exchange — its defaults lead with the X25519MLKEM768 hybrid. hypertor installs it explicitly at startup: rustls can only infer a provider when exactly one is compiled in and panics otherwise, and an application that pulls rustls’s ring feature in from elsewhere would otherwise take that panic in its own build.

If you must use the operating system’s TLS stack:

cargo add hypertor --no-default-features --features client,native-tls

Note that native-tls cannot enforce a TLS 1.3 floor and cannot negotiate ALPN, so min_tls_version(Tls13) returns an error there rather than silently downgrading, and HTTP/2 over TLS is unavailable.

Proof of work and licensing

pow enables the Equi-X proof-of-work defence for onion services. It is not included in full, because the implementation (equix, hashx) is LGPL-3.0-only while hypertor itself is MIT. A default build — client or server — contains no copyleft code.

cargo add hypertor --features server,pow

Calling .proof_of_work(true) without the feature is an error at launch, rather than a service that silently runs unprotected.

Python

pip install hypertor

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Wheels ship for Linux and macOS on x86-64 and arm64, and for Windows on x86-64; no Rust toolchain is needed to install one.

They are built against CPython’s stable ABI (abi3), so a single wheel per platform serves every interpreter from 3.10 up — the same file installs on 3.10 and on 3.13. SQLite is linked statically into it, so arti’s state store does not depend on whatever libsqlite3 the target system has, or lacks.

On a platform with no wheel, pip falls back to the source distribution and compiles arti, which needs a Rust toolchain and takes a while.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/hupe1980/hypertor
cd hypertor/bindings/python

uv sync --all-extras          # or: pip install maturin pytest
maturin develop

Everything for the bindings lives in bindings/python: the Rust crate, the Python package, its tests, its examples and its pyproject.toml.

That crate is not published to crates.io. It depends on hypertor through the same public API any other consumer uses, so a Rust dependency on hypertor never pulls in pyo3, and there is no python feature to enable. maturin turns on pyo3/extension-module, which leaves CPython’s symbols for the loading interpreter to supply; the crate does not enable it itself, so a plain cargo build in the workspace links against libpython and works — which is what makes the bindings unit-testable at all.

No Tor daemon needed

hypertor uses arti, a pure-Rust Tor implementation, so it speaks the Tor protocol itself. You do not need the C tor daemon, Tor Browser, or torsocks installed.

Platform notes

Windows. arti needs SQLite for its state store. If your system provides none, enable static-sqlite:

cargo add hypertor --features static-sqlite

Pluggable transports. Bridges using obfs4, snowflake or webtunnel need the corresponding transport binary installed separately — hypertor launches it, it does not bundle it. On Debian and Ubuntu, apt install obfs4proxy provides lyrebird.

Verifying it works

cargo run --example client

Should print a JSON object with "IsTor": true.