Mirror your site over Tor

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- Now that you have a website, why not offer it on a private alternative such as the onion network? -

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Setting up Tor

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Installing Tor

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First, we need to ensure that our CPU architecture is supported. Ensure that it is either amd64, arm64, or i386:

dpkg --print-architecture

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We need to add the Tor repos to our system to get the latest version of Tor:

apt install -y apt-transport-https gpg
-echo "deb     [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $(lsb_release -cs) main
-deb-src [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $(lsb_release -cs) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list

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Then we need to add the GPG keys to our keyring:

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curl -s https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg

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Now install Tor:

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apt update
-apt install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring

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Enabling Tor

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Next edit the file /etc/tor/torrc, uncommenting the following lines:

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
-HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

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Now start and enable Tor at boot:

 systemctl enable --now tor

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If the next command outputs active in green you're golden!

 systemctl status tor

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Now your server is on the dark web. The following command will give you your onion address:

 cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname

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Adding the Nginx Config

- From here, the steps are almost identical to setting up a normal website configuration file. - Follow the steps as if you were making a new website in the webserver - tutorial up until the server block of code. Instead, paste this: -

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        server {
-            listen 127.0.0.1:80 ;
-            root /var/www/landchad ;
-            index index.html ;
-            server_name your-onion-address.onion ;
-        }

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- Now we are almost done, all we have to do is enable the site and reload nginx which, is also covered in the webserver tutorial. -

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Advertise your onion service

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You can add the Onion-Location header to your normal website to advertise your onion service to Tor users. On your regular site's nginx config, add the following line:

server {
-    ...
-    add_header Onion-Location http://your-onion-address.onion$request_uri;
-}

After doing this and reloading nginx, when visiting your regular site via Tor, you should see a ".onion available" button on the address bar, which should take you to the onion service.

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Update regularly!

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Make sure to update Tor on a regular basis by running:

apt update
-apt install tor

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Note:

You do not need to run certbot for an ssl certificate. HTTP over tor is plenty secure!

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Contributor - tomfasano.co

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