Knowledgebase / Onion Address / How to create a vanity v2 Tor .onion web address on Windows

This tutorial will show you how to create a vanity v2 tor onion web address and generate a private key of the customized vanity v2 tor onion web address on windows, using cygwin, eschalot.

Cygwin provides functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows environment. You can use cygwin to compile eschalot from its source, so you can run the software on Windows environment.

If you are using Linux environment, you can check out the "How to create a vanity v2 Tor .onion web address"

Downloading Cygwin

To download Cygwin, you can download it in Cygwin official website. Cygwin is free software under several licenses and you should have read it before using cygwin.

Installing Cygwin

To install Cygwin, you should have follow strictly what the video shown. The below packages are necessary for compiling eschalot:

  • make
  • cmake
  • clang
  • openssl
  • openssl-devel
  • libssl
  • libssl-devel

After selecting the packages, this will take abount 10 minutes to install the unix-like environment and the required packages.

Downloading Eschalot

Eschalot is a software and it allows end user to produce customized vanity .onion web address, such as producing onion address starting with some characters or containing some characters in the middle.

To download eschalot, you can download it in GitHub, which is the world's largest open source development platform. There's also a readme file in the GitHub page to show how to compile the software and how to use the software.

Using Eschalot

After downloading eschalot, you will have to compile the software before use. On windows environment, open the Cygwin terminal, located at the desktop, and navigate to the main director of the eschalot, and do make to compile the software.

After compiling eschalot, the software is then ready to use. There's easy to read guideline to use the software. If you are generating a onion web address begining with 'foo', you can type the below command:

./eschalot.exe -v -r ^foo

If you are generating a onion web address containing 'foo', you can type the below command:

./eschalot.exe -v -r foo

If you would like to generate a long customized onion web address, however, this is not an easy task. The time to generate a customized onion web address is dependent to the given number of characters. That's to say, if you give 5 characters and the software usually takes about 1 minute to genreate. But, if you give 7 characters, it may take you a day to generate a customized onion address. The performance statistic can be seen here.

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