This morning I easily started running a Tor Snowflake relay on my home server, and wanted to share my experience in case anyone has bandwidth to share to help out folks with censored internet. This is not running an “exit node”, where onion-routed traffic leaves the Tor network and hits the public web servers (which can cause troubles with your ISP), but rather an encrypted-to-encrypted bridge in the routing network. If you want to stick it to Russia, Iran, China, and anyone else stifling free speech of their own residents via censored internet, this is an easy way to help.

$ cat docker-compose.yml
version: "2"

services:
snowflake-proxy:
network_mode: host
image: thetorproject/snowflake-proxy:latest
container_name: snowflake-proxy
restart: unless-stopped
command: ["-verbose", "-unsafe-logging", "-summary-interval", "1m"]
$ docker-compose up -d snowflake-proxy

I took their default docker-compose file and changed the version to 2, which is the latest that my old server’s docker supports. I also added the command line to get some debugging logs to make sure it’s working right. Here’s how you check those logs to make sure you’re getting relay connections:

$ docker logs snowflake-proxy
...
2022/10/04 13:54:09 In the last 1m0s, there were 5 connections. Traffic Relayed ↑ 53 MB, ↓ 4 MB.
...