How to Choose the Exit Country in Tor Browser (ExitNodes)
I needed to see a website as if I were in another country.
Sure, you can look for a proxy or an anonymizer, but I don’t like them — only when I need something quick and short. There are also apps (Opera VPN, for example) and paid VPN servers, but often the popular countries are free (with limits, at best), while the rare ones come with a monthly fee.
Another option is Tor: you can tell it which country to use as your exit to the internet. It takes a single line in the config file.
What Tor is
Tor (The Onion Router) is free, open-source software. It sends your traffic through a chain of three Tor network servers (relays) and encrypts it at every step. A website sees not your IP but the IP of the last relay — the exit node. That is the one whose country you can choose.
Not everyone needs anonymity, but this VPN-like feature of Tor comes in handy now and then.
How to choose the exit country in Tor (as of November 2026)
1. Close Tor Browser. While it is running, changes to the settings won’t apply.
2. Find the torrc file. On Windows it is inside the folder where Tor Browser is installed:
Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Tor\torrc
On Linux the path is the same, just with / slashes. On macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/TorBrowser-Data/Tor/torrc
3. Open torrc in a text editor (Notepad will do on Windows) and add an ExitNodes line at the end. Countries are given as two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes in curly braces, separated by commas; letter case doesn’t matter.
For example, to exit through Germany or Poland:
ExitNodes {de},{pl}
4. Save the file, start Tor Browser and check which IP and country are detected on any IP lookup site.
How to block exits through a specific country
To make Tor never exit to the internet through a certain country, add the ExcludeExitNodes option to the same torrc:
ExcludeExitNodes {us}
Here {us} is the country Tor must not exit through.
Older guides use the StrictExitNodes option for this — Tor no longer has it, so it simply won’t work.
If ExitNodes already lists the allowed countries, you usually don’t need ExcludeExitNodes.
Things to keep in mind
Fewer countries means slower. The shorter the ExitNodes list, the fewer relays Tor can choose from. If a country has few exit nodes, sites will load slowly or not at all.
Anonymity. The Tor developers themselves advise against editing torrc without a reason: Tor Browser already ships with safe defaults, and extra changes can weaken your protection. For viewing a site from another country that’s fine, but if you use Tor specifically for anonymity, better leave the settings alone.
How to undo it. Remove the lines you added to torrc and restart Tor Browser.
P.S. Tor is a tool, like a knife: you can slice bread and sausage with it, or you can do bad things. Use Tor for good :-)
Tor too slow? If you need to browse through another country all the time, a regular VPN is faster — for example, from Fornex (10% off through my link).
The Fornex link is an affiliate link: you get a discount, and the blog earns a small commission.