[tor-relays] Updates to Tor Bridge?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 12:39:29AM +0000, doTheRightThing655 at protonmail.com wrote:
> I recently started running a Tor Bridge on my Windows 10 PC. How do I update it?

On Windows, Tor things other than Tor Browser are alas not
well-supported. In part that's because Windows doesn't have a
regularly-used package manager like other common operating systems like
Debian or Ubuntu.

So how you update depends on how you installed it the first time. If you
downloaded the expert bundle (reachable, counterintuitively, from the
"Download Tor Source Code" link on https://www.torproject.org/download/ )
then the way to update is to download and unpack the expert bundle again.

You should be able to reuse your torrc file, and your DataDirectory
which contains your bridge's keys, so the update itself should be pretty
painless.

You can watch the tor-announce@ list to learn when new updates are out:
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-announce
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-announce/

> Does updating the Tor Browser app update my Bridge? Or is there a method to doing this? Thanks!

If you configured your Tor Browser to be the bridge, then yes, updating
Tor Browser should update everything. I would still suggest checking
afterwards to see whether everything survived the update intact --
I could imagine some Tor Browser updates accidentally reverting rare
config changes like this one.

--Roger