Creating an Onion Website

calendar Feb 13, 2019 · 2 min read · Tor Tutorial  ·
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Creating a hidden service is a good way to get introduced to tor and onion routing. For this walk through, I will be installing tor on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and be using nginx as my web server. This is for educational purposes only. What you do on your hidden service is your responsibility.

Installing Nginx

  1. sudo apt install nginx

 

Installing Tor

To get the tor binaries you can either install from the tor repositories or you can download and build it from source. In this, I will be installing it via the repositories because it is quicker and easier.

1sudo apt install apt-transport-https lsb-release
2echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list
3echo "deb-src [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list
4sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring

Now tor and nginx are installed and we just have to configure them.

Configuring Nginx

  1. Make web root. This is where your web files will go:

    sudo mkdir -p /var/www/onionsite/

  2. Nginx config server file.

    • You want to make a simple nginx config file in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/tor.
    • My file is
      Nginx config file

  3. Link Nginx config:

    sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/tor /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Warning

Use the full path when linking otherwise it can break.

Configuring Tor

The default tor config is located at /etc/tor/torrc. I would recommend backing up the current one you have and starting fresh. You want a config that contains:

1SOCKSPort 0
2DataDirectory /var/lib/tor
3HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/onion/
4HiddenServiceVersion 3
5HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:445
Note

You can omit HiddenServiceVersion 3 if you want to run an onion v2 hidden service.

You can omit this line if you want to run an onion v2 hidden service.

Mine looks like

Tor Config File

And you now have a hidden service configure. Just restart all service:

sudo systemctl restart nginx tor

Your hidden service address will be generated in /var/lib/tor/onion/<hostname>/.
Enjoy your hidden service web site.