Bad HashedControlPassword: wrong length or bad encoding error

[00h-i-r-a00]

Hello,

I have an application that uses node-ths to instantiate an instance of Tor. It works alright sometimes, but periodically it goes into a state of silently failing, that is it is completely unable to instantiate any instance of Tor. For quite a long amount of time. Sometimes several days. To debug it, I printed this line

console.log('Error with the tor process : ' + data.toString('utf8'));

inside this.start inside index.js

and its giving me the error:

Error with the tor process : Sep 04 16:21:17.032 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Bad HashedControlPassword: wrong length or bad encoding

Error with the tor process : Sep 04 16:21:17.032 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.

So, I tried to check the hash thats being returned by passHash.js, and what I found was that it was returning "undefined". As a possible solution, I have tried replacing the hash inside saveTorrc to something static (found inside my tor's torrc file) but that isn't working either. Do you think you could help?

Also, another question that I have is that when you instantiate tor, does it take into account the torrc file that I have inside my local etc/tor folder? When I try changing the exit nodes inside the etc/tor version (and not the one found inside ths-data within node-ths), it does work. So, I have a certain confusion about which particular torrc file is being used for configuration?

Thanks. Would really appreciate help regarding this.