Torsocks acts as a network wrapper around linux applications. This allows them to work on the Tor network where that might not normally be possible. If the application that you are working with already has functionality that allows it to take advantage of a SOCKS5 proxy, then you can use Tor’s built in proxy to do that. However if the application doesn’t have that functionality, you can try to use Torsocks instead.

This post originally came from a reply that I made to a question that was asked on the r/tor subreddit.

So, you want to run the tor service on in Linux but not just with the Tor Browser. Let’s assume that you’re running a Debian-based Linux distro.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install tor torsocks
sudo systemctl enable --now tor

This will install the tor service and run it as a server as the “tor” user. Any program that you run that can use a SOCKS5 proxy can take advantage of this service by connecting to localhost:9050.