How do I install tor on arch in a country where tor is blocked?

Question

I'm trying to install tor in a country (UAE) where it's blocked. I get an error presumably because it's blocked here:

:: Checking for conflicts...
:: Checking for inner conflicts...
[Aur: 1]  tor-browser-8.5.5-1

  1 tor-browser                              (Build Files Exist)
==> Packages to cleanBuild?
==> [N]one [A]ll [Ab]ort [I]nstalled [No]tInstalled or (1 2 3, 1-3, ^4)
==> 
:: PKGBUILD up to date, Skipping (1/1): tor-browser
  1 tor-browser                              (Build Files Exist)
==> Diffs to show?
==> [N]one [A]ll [Ab]ort [I]nstalled [No]tInstalled or (1 2 3, 1-3, ^4)
==> 
:: Parsing SRCINFO (1/1): tor-browser
==> Making package: tor-browser 8.5.5-1 (Mon Oct 14 17:01:56 2019)
==> Retrieving sources...
  -> Found tor-browser.desktop
  -> Found tor-browser.png
  -> Found tor-browser.sh
  -> Downloading tor-browser-linux64-8.5.5_en-US.tar.xz...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
curl: (35) OpenSSL SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to dist.torproject.org:443 
==> ERROR: Failure while downloading https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/8.5.5/tor-browser-linux64-8.5.5_en-US.tar.xz
    Aborting...
Error downloading sources: tor-browser

Someone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Forget using AUR for this because AUR will only download from one specific place unless you recode it to pull from another location yourself. Download Tor Browser from another source. I am going to copy and paste the entire page from the Tor Project since you probably can't read it yourself from UAE

The safest and simplest way to download Tor Browser is from the official Tor Project website at https://www.torproject.org/download. Your connection to the site will be secured using HTTPS, which makes it much harder for somebody to tamper with.

However, there may be times when you cannot access the Tor Project website: for example, it could be blocked on your network. If this happens, you can use one of the alternative download methods listed below.

MIRRORS If you're unable to download Tor Browser from the official Tor Project website, you can instead try downloading it from one of our official mirrors, either through EFF or Calyx Institute.

GETTOR GetTor is a service that automatically responds to messages with links to the latest version of Tor Browser, hosted at a variety of locations, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and GitHub.

TO USE GETTOR VIA EMAIL: Send an email to [email protected], and in the body of the message simply write “windows”, “osx”, or “linux”, (without quotation marks) depending on your operating system.

GetTor will respond with an email containing links from which you can download the Tor Browser package, the cryptographic signature (needed for verifying the download), the fingerprint of the key used to make the signature, and the package’s checksum. You may be offered a choice of “32-bit” or “64-bit” software: this depends on the model of the computer you are using.

Answer 2

With arch you can install torsocks then install tor-browser from aur like this

sudo pacman -S community/torsocks

torify yay -S aur/tor-browser