[Privoxy-users] Run Privoxy on Windows without the GUI

[Joel Verhagen]

Hey folks,

I'm the maintainer of TorSharp, a library for helping Tor and Privoxy
interact easily, surfaced as a .NET API (
https://github.com/joelverhagen/TorSharp). My library works on many Linux
distros and Windows.

On Windows, I have not found a way to run Privoxy in a "headless" or no GUI
mode. No matter how I configure or start the process, the Windows UI
appears. I'd like to run it in the background on demand, without running it
as a Windows Service. Ideally, I'd like to disable the taskbar icon as well
since on non-graceful process termination the taskbar icons sometimes
remain (which is kind of ugly but probably a Windows thing, not a Privoxy
thing).

Is running Privoxy without the GUI possible on Windows?

I found this in the config documentation:

The "hide-console" option is specific to the MS-Win console version of
Privoxy. If this option is used, Privoxy will disconnect from and hide the
command console.


I tried enabling this but it didn't seem to do what I expected. Perhaps I
am misunderstanding what the "MS-Win console version" is. Is there an
official binary distribution of the MS-Win console version? I was unable to
find it.

I noticed the undocumented "--service" command line argument is passed to
Privoxy when it runs as a service, but using this manually does not have
the desired effect.

>From the source code I see a "_WIN_CONSOLE" #ifdef here and there, which
suggests to me that if I could figure out how to build Privoxy on Windows
with this defined, I might be in luck, but I wanted to check with this
mailing list first.

Apologies if I am missing something obvious. I am using version 3.0.33 of
Privoxy.

Joel