Have we told you lately how much we love our relay operators? Relays are the backbone of the Tor network, providing strength and bandwidth for our millions of users worldwide. Without the thousands of fast, reliable relays in the network, Tor wouldn't exist.

Have you considered running a relay, but didn't know where to start? Perhaps you're just looking for a way to help Tor, but you've always thought that running a relay was too complicated or technical for you and the documentation seemed daunting.

We're here to tell you that you can become one of the many thousands of relay operators powering the Tor network, if you have some basic command-line experience.

We've created The Tor Relay Guide to:

grow the Tor network

demystify relay operation for newcomers

organize important relay resources in one place

encourage everyone who reads it to support the Tor network by setting up their own relay

make the Tor network more robust (example: To reduce the overall fraction of outdated relays, we added instructions for enabling automatic updates.)

emphasize diversity on network and OS level (Most of the Tor network runs on Linux, so we emphasize OS-level diversity and encourage people who can to run BSD-based OSes.)

The guide is split into 3 parts:





We've made the guide read-only in order to maintain quality control over the content. This guide updates and replaces existing relay documentation. Eventually, the Tor Relay Guide will become part of our future Community Portal, which will live at community.torproject.org (not available yet). In addition to the Tor Relay Guide content, the Community Portal will include information for Tor trainers, ways to get involved with the Tor community, talks and other events happening in the Tor world, and more.

If you run into technical issues while setting up your relay, please reach out to the tor-relays mailing list (subscribing is required to post to the list).

Did you find a mistake or want to help improving the guide? Let us know. Please file your suggestions on trac.torproject.org under the "Community/Relays" component.

Thank you to all who helped with this.