Host a Tor Hidden Service (Nginx)
Create and Publish a new Website on Tor
Prerequisites
Whether you want to create a new website or host an existing one on the Tor network, you will need the following packages in both cases:
Tor:
apt-get install tor -y
Nginx:
apt-get install nginx -y
Step 1 - Create Website
If you already have an existing page you can skip this step.
First of all, we need a simple website. For this we create a directory for the page in /var/www.
mkdir -p /var/www/example_page
In this folder we now create our page which is supposed to be accessible via the Tor network.
nano /var/www/example_page/index.html
Our HTML file now gets a little content so that we can see if we are really on our server.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>Congratulations!</h1>
<p>You have successfully set up your Tor Hidden Service!</p>
</body>
</html>
Very good! Step 1 is now done, next we will configure our Nginx service!
Step 2 - Setup Nginx
First we need a vhost file for our website.
nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example_page.vhost
We now fill up the file with this configuration:
server {
// localhost and your port
listen 127.0.0.1:80;
// root directory of your website
root /var/www/example_page;
// index.html of your website
index index.html;
} ***Attention**! If you use the parameter "server_name" in your nginx configuration, you also have to add your \*. onion url here (how to get it you can find out in step 3)*
That is the basic vhost File. Now we just have to validate our vhost-File and restart Nginx.
nginx -t
service nginx reload
Optional: If you are using for example a Node. js server, you only have to change the port from 80 to your server’s port and it will work in the same way.
You also can say deny all and just allow 127.0.0.1 then your page is just on the Tor Network available.
Step 3 - Configure the Tor Hidden Service
Open the tor configuration file:
nano /etc/tor/torrc
and create there your Hidden Service:
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/example_page/
HiddenServicePort 80 now just restart Tor
service tor restart
and your site is available on the Onion Network.
To find out the current URL of your page change to the Tor folder of your page
cd /var/lib/tor/example_page/
and enter the following command here:
cat hostname
Have fun with your site! I hope the article could help you.
