using tor as a SOCKS5 proxy with python urllib2 or mechanize

Question

My goal is to use python\'s mechanize with a tor SOCKS proxy.

I am not using a GUI with the following Ubuntu version: Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS

Answer 1

The above solution didn't work for me. I am on Ubuntu 14.04. Whenever I try to run the above script it keeps throwing the following error.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 127, in urlopen
  return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 404, in open
  response = self._open(req, data)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 422, in _open
  '_open', req)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 382, in _call_chain
  result = func(*args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1214, in http_open
  return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1184, in do_open
  raise URLError(err)
urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error ((1, 'general SOCKS server failure'),)>

Checked if tor is running by using the nmap command.

Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.00026s latency).
Not shown: 993 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
445/tcp  open  microsoft-ds
631/tcp  open  ipp
902/tcp  open  iss-realsecure
3306/tcp open  mysql
9050/tcp open  tor-socks

Installing Vidalia solved this problem. Apparently, the socks proxy was not allowing the connection to pass through it. Hope this might help someone facing the same problem.

Answer 2

See end of question.

import socks
import socket
def create_connection(address, timeout=None, source_address=None):
    sock = socks.socksocket()
    sock.connect(address)
    return sock

socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 9050)

# patch the socket module
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
socket.create_connection = create_connection

import urllib2

print urllib2.urlopen('http://icanhazip.com').read()

import mechanize
from mechanize import Browser

br = Browser()
print br.open('http://icanhazip.com').read()