Meek is another pluggable transport supported by DeepOnion which relays the traffic through a third-party server, for example a CDN. This technique uses a trick called domain fronting to communicate with a Tor relay while appearing to communicate with another domain.
If you're on Windows a Tor-Browser installation is mandatory as we will be using the meek-client.exe from the installation directory. Please, download the installation package for your system and run the installer.
Under Windows the meek-client executable is located at
YOUR_TOR_BROWSER_ROOT\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\PluggableTransports
Under Linux the installation of Tor-Broweser is not needed. meek-client can be installed separately by executing below commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hda-me/meek
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install meek-client
The executable will be located under /usr/bin/meek-client. If your Linux system installs packages in a different folder, query the location by executing which meek-client.
Open your DeepOnion.conf and enter below parameters to activate meek at the Wallet UI or daemon startup.
torplugin=meek
torpluginpath=MEEK_CLIENT_EXE_PATH (e.g. c:\bin\meek-client.exe or /usr/bin/meek-client)
On Windows the full path to meek-client.exe depends on your Tor-Browser path. Do not attempt to start your Wallet UI or daemon without having provided the full path to meek-client.
This is an example of a location of meek-client.exe when Tor-Browser was installed under C:\bin:
It's also allowed to copy meek-client.exe to another location, for example the folder of your Wallet UI. In this case you have to take care of providing the correct path.
On Linux and Mac you can get the location of meek-client by executing which meek-client in the console.
As meek-client heavily depends on available Bridges it is very important to keep an eye on them. Be always up-to-date regarding available front domains.
You should also look into extension-override.js that is located under Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Browser\profile.default\preferences in your Tor-Browser path. Open this file and scroll down until you see entries that begin with extensions.torlauncher.default_bridge.meek.
Copy the contents from lines that begin with meek 0.0. and append the keyword Bridge to both of them. They should now look like this:
Bridge meek 0.0.2.0:2 B9E7141C594AF25699E0079C1F0146F409495296 url=https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com
Bridge meek 0.0.2.0:3 97700DFE9F483596DDA6264C4D7DF7641E1E39CE url=https://meek.azureedge.net/ front=ajax.aspnetcdn.com
Insert those lines into your torrc which is located under:
- %APPDATA%/Roaming/DeepOnion/tor (Windows)
- ~/.DeepOnion/tor (Linux)
- ~/Library/Application Support/DeepOnion/tor (Mac)
Under Windows you must take care of not saving this file with default extension appended to it (usually *.txt). One good way to avoid this problem is to edit the file with a powerful text editor like Nodepad++ and to select All types option on saving.
Open your tor.log which is located under the same folder where your torrc is. After a few moments you should see an output similar to this:
- During our tests on Windows we experienced issues when running the Wallet UI with multiple Bridge entries in torrc. The problems didn't show up with configurations containing only a single active Bridge entry.
- After closing the Wallet UI on Windows you'll have to close the running meek-client.exe manually (via TaskManager for example)
- If your Bridge is blocked, as it often happens in China, please get additional information from below websites. The front servers can change at any time and it's your responsibility to be up-to-date.
In China, Meek-azure and Meek-amazon can not be used, the following is the log, how can we use Meek?
What to do if meek gets blocked?
A list of censored cloudfront domains can be found here.