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

[Joel Verhagen]

Thanks for your response, Fabian.

> I think we currently don't release such binaries mainly due to lack of
demand and time.

One option for the Windows build would be to set up a GitHub Actions
workflow that produces it on one of their free, hosted CI agents. I do this
with my TorSharp project for .NET Framework testing (which is Windows-only
vs. .NET Core).

>  I suspect that it wouldn't be too hard to add an option to the mingw32
build that allows to hide the GUI but someone would have to do the actual
work and we are currently short on Windows developers and Windows
development systems.

I'm currently playing with several side projects so this might be a fun
thing to pick up. I'll try to give it a shot. Would these specifics be
better discussed on the privoxy-devel list? Sorry if I'm polluting the
wrong list.

Thanks again for the confirmation.

Joel Verhagen


On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 1:37 PM Fabian Keil <fk at fabiankeil.de> wrote:

> Joel Verhagen <joel.verhagen at gmail.com> wrote on 2022-12-30 at 13:10:40:
>
> > 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.
>
> Interesting. Thanks for making Privoxy available to more users.
>
> > 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.
>
> There's a comment in the code in win32.c that says:
>
>     76  /**
>     77   * Hide the console.  If set, the program will disconnect from the
>     78   * console and run in the background.  This allows the
> command-prompt
>     79   * window to close.
>     80   */
>     81  int hideConsole     = 0;
>
> My interpretation of it is that the option is not supposed to affect
> whether or not the GUI is opened and merely allows to close the
> console/terminal window after starting Privoxy through 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.
>
> The code in jcc.c suggests that the option only works when Privoxy
> was started by the "service control manager":
>
>   5984     if (bRunAsService)
>   5985     {
>   5986        /* Yup, so now we must attempt to establish a connection
>   5987         * with the service dispatcher. This will only work if this
>   5988         * process was launched by the service control manager to
>   5989         * actually run as a service. If this isn't the case, i've
>   5990         * known it take around 30 seconds or so for the call to
> return.
>   5991         */
>   5992
>   5993        /* The StartServiceCtrlDispatcher won't return until the
> service is stopping */
>   5994        if
> (w32_start_service_ctrl_dispatcher(w32ServiceDispatchTable))
>   5995        {
>   5996           /* Service has run, and at this point is now being
> stopped, so just return */
>   5997           return 0;
>   5998        }
>   5999
>   6000  #ifdef _WIN_CONSOLE
>   6001        printf("Warning: Failed to connect to Service Control
> Dispatcher\nwhen starting as a service!\n");
>   6002  #endif
>   6003        /* An error occurred. Usually it's because --service was
> wrongly specified
>   6004         * and we were unable to connect to the Service Control
> Dispatcher because
>   6005         * it wasn't expecting us and is therefore not listening.
>   6006         *
>   6007         * For now, just continue below to call the listen_loop
> function.
>   6008         */
>   6009     }
>   6010  #endif /* def _WIN32 */
>   6011
>   6012     listen_loop();
>
> > 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.
>
> You can not build the Windows GUI code by running configure without
> the --enable-mingw32 flag. The resulting binary relies more heavily
> on the Cygwin stuff and if I remember correctly needs different dlls
> to work.
>
> I think we currently don't release such binaries mainly due to lack
> of demand and time.
>
> I suspect that it wouldn't be too hard to add an option to the
> mingw32 build that allows to hide the GUI but someone would
> have to do the actual work and we are currently short on Windows
> developers and Windows development systems.
>
> > Apologies if I am missing something obvious. I am using version 3.0.33 of
> > Privoxy.
>
> I've CC'd Lee who is more familiar with building and running Privoxy
> on Windows than me and may have additional ideas.
>
> While I still have a WindowsXP-VM-Image lying around, last time I tried
> it using Qemu on ElectroBSD it it didn't detect the network card anymore
> which made using it really inconvenient.
>
> If I remember correctly, I also have a disk image from a Windows 7
> installation but it refuses to boot in a VM and the laptop it came
> from and may still work is needed for ElectroBSD.
>
> Fabian
>