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A quickstart guide for getting Kovri up and running.

1. Contact & Support

First off, if you run into trouble on any of these steps, it's useful to know where you can find help. Please go to our #kovri IRC channel for general Kovri inquiries and our #kovri-dev channel for questions that are development related. Ask your question and be patient as you wait for an answer.

2. Download Kovri

Download one of the binaries or build from source (see the Building section in the documentation for details).

3. Open NAT/Firewall

Kovri should randomly generate a new port to use on startup, but if you want to choose your own, you can go to kovri.conf and set any port between 9111 and 30777. See the User Guide in the documentation for more details.

Stop! Let's talk about Operational Security (Opsec)

Kovri can help keep you anonymous to a point, but it can't defend against user error. For this reason, we recommend a few opsec-related housekeeping things.

  1. Make a designated user for running Kovri, and ONLY run Kovri using that user.
  2. We recommend using Linux, and a even then consider using a hardened kernel (such as grsec with RBAC)
  3. After installing the appropriate resources in your kovri data path, consider setting appropriate access control with setfacl, umask, or whatever your OS uses for ACL.
    Note: see kovri.conf to find your data path for Linux/macOS/Windows
  4. Never share your port number with anyone as it will affect your anonymity!

5. Set up Tunnels

There's two types of tunnels, client and server. Client tunnels are used to connect to other services and server tunnels are used if you want to host your own services. To learn how to add or remove tunnels, read the User Guide for details.

6. Run Kovri

Here you are. You're almost done. Now the only thing left to do is to run cd build/ && ./kovri in your terminal. Once connected, it should take about 5 minutes to bootstrap into the network and start using services, so be patient. Remember to report any bugs if you run into any trouble. See? That wasn't so hard, was it? Have fun!