Running pirated Behind Your Own Tor & I2P

By default, pirated can launch and manage its own bundled Tor and i2pd daemons (torautostart/i2pdautostart, both on by default) so Tor/I2P support works out of the box with zero setup.

This guide is for the opposite case: you already run Tor and/or i2pd yourself - as a system service, shared with other applications, under your own package/version, monitoring, etc. - and just want pirated to use that instance instead of launching its own. Everything else about how pirated behaves on Tor/I2P (stream isolation, private tx relay, onion service creation, I2P identity rotation) is left at its normal defaults; this guide only changes who’s responsible for the Tor/i2pd process itself.

Prerequisites

• A synced pirated node - see Installation.
• Tor and/or i2pd installed via your distro’s package manager (or however you already manage them) and not the embedded daemon pirated would otherwise launch.

Tor

1. Install Tor

sudo apt-get install tor

2. Enable the control port

Edit /etc/tor/torrc and add:

ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1
CookieAuthFileGroupReadable 1

Leave SOCKSPort alone - the Debian/Ubuntu Tor package already listens on 127.0.0.1:9050 by default, which matches pirated’s own -torsocksport default.

Restart Tor:

sudo systemctl restart tor

3. Let pirated authenticate to the control port

pirated prefers Tor’s SAFECOOKIE authentication - it reads the auth cookie file Tor writes under its data directory (typically /var/run/tor/control.authcookie on a Debian/Ubuntu package install; check your distro if it’s elsewhere). The simplest way to grant access is to add the user pirated runs as to Tor’s group (debian-tor on Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo usermod -a -G debian-tor $USER

Log out and back in (or start a new shell) for the group change to take effect.

Note

If you’d rather not use group-based cookie access, set a control-port password instead: tor --hash-password yourpassword and add the printed HashedControlPassword 16:... line to torrc, then set torpassword=yourpassword in PIRATE.conf (the plaintext password, not the hash).

4. PIRATE.conf

torautostart=0
listenonion=1

torcontrol (default 127.0.0.1:9051) and torsocksport (default 127.0.0.1:9050) already match the stock Tor package’s ports, so there’s nothing else to set unless you moved them. Once pirated authenticates to the control port, it automatically uses torsocksport as the SOCKS proxy for onion peers, generates a persistent ed25519 onion service key on first run (cached under the datadir’s onion_v3_private_key), and starts advertising it.

5. Verify

tail -f ~/.komodo/PIRATE/debug.log | grep -i tor

You should see a successful control-port authentication and a generated .onion address. pirate-cli getnetworkinfo will also list the onion address under localaddresses once the hidden service is up.

I2P

1. Install i2pd

sudo apt-get install i2pd

2. Enable the SAM API

Edit /etc/i2pd/i2pd.conf and add (or uncomment) under the [sam] section:

[sam]
enabled = true
address = 127.0.0.1
port = 7656

Restart i2pd:

sudo systemctl restart i2pd

3. PIRATE.conf

i2pdautostart=0
i2psam=127.0.0.1:7656

Note

Unlike Tor, i2psam has no default once i2pdautostart is disabled - if you leave it unset, I2P stays off entirely. It must point at your i2pd’s SAM address explicitly.

i2pacceptincoming already defaults to 1, so inbound I2P connections are accepted automatically as soon as i2psam is set - no extra flag needed unless you specifically want outbound-only I2P (i2pacceptincoming=0).

4. Verify

tail -f ~/.komodo/PIRATE/debug.log | grep -i i2p

Combining with lightwalletd (optional)

If you’re also running lightwalletd (see the Lite Daemon guide), it can reuse this same standalone Tor/i2pd setup with --tor-enable/--i2p-enable - it reads -torcontrol/-torpassword/-i2psam straight out of the same PIRATE.conf you just configured, so there’s nothing further to set up. See Lightwalletd Parameters for details.

What this doesn’t change

Everything else about pirated’s Tor/I2P behavior is untouched and stays at its normal default: stream isolation (proxyrandomize=1), restricting locally-originated transaction relay to Tor/I2P peers when available (privatetxrelay=1, falling back to clearnet peers if none are connected via privatetxrelayfallback=1), and the rotating pool of short-lived I2P relay identities (i2pidentityrotation=1). This guide only swaps which process manages Tor/i2pd - it doesn’t turn any of that off.