disclaimer
I am not responsible if you break something. Please consult with your laws to see if using Tor is legal in your country. A example where it is not legal is China. In most countries it is legal but again please check you laws. This guide was written for Linux but may work on MacOS but will definitely not work on windows without some tweaks.
Background
After my dockerised IRC project I realized that I wanted to host a website on the dark web. I spent a couple of hours working o
n this. I hope you guys like this. This tutorial uses django for the website. Below is my file structure if you want to follow. project ├── app ├── docker-compose.yml ├── Dockerfile └── tor └── Dockerfile ## The Website The website itself can be anything assuming you use django. If you use PostgreSQL or any thing else as the database you will nee
d to do some extra configs. This is beyond the scope of this tutorial. The docker container hosting all of this is fairly simple. You will need to add more steps the more complex your website becomes.
FROM python:3.8
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
ENV PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE 1
RUN pip install django gunicorn
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY ./app/ ./
ENTRYPOINT tail -F /dev/null
gunicorn is for a later step we can ignore it for now. To test if our website works. We can run the following.
docker build . -t website
docker rm website
docker run -d --name website -p 8000:8000 website
docker exec -it website python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
These will build and launch the docker container so we can test it out. You will be able to navigate to http://localhost:8000
and see your website running. At this point you can remove the last line IE. ENTRYPOINT tail -F /dev/null can be removed.
The Tor Container
Like the IRC we will be keeping the tor proxy in a separate container. We will need to create a new torrc. Like before, you ca
n run the following to get the torrc file (this is assuming you are running Linux, if you are not please look into your OSs configs for tor)
sudo cp /etc/tor/torrc ./configs/torrc
find the following lines
#HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80
Uncomment and change the second line to appear the same as the one bellow.
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 website:8000
If you are observant you might notice that the ports are weird in the config. This is to ensure that when a person connects using the Tor browser it will automatically connect to the website(using other ports will result in you having to supply a port with the address in a web browser like tor) ## Docker-Compose well here we are again. The docker compose file. This is a god send for us as instead of one massive command we have a small on e.
version: '3.7'
services:
web:
container_name: website
build: .
command: gunicorn hello_django.wsgi:application --bind 0.0.0.0:8000
volumes:
- ./app/:/usr/src/app/
tor:
container_name: tor_host
build: ./tor
links:
- web
depends_on:
- web
ports:
- 9001:9001
- 9030:9030
Remember I said don't worry about gunicorn a while back. Its time to worry about it. If you have used django before you will kn
ow it always states when you use manage.py runserver do not use this in a production environment. Gunicorn is one of the many
option you can use in a situation like this. There are other solutions like uwsgi but they require configs so we are just going to use gunicorn(I am lazy. Sue me if you don't like that (this is a joke)).
Like before you can run start the entire system with the following commands.
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it tor_host service tor start
docker exec -it tor_host cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname
You will get a .onion link from the last command. You will not be able to use this in a regular browser. You will need to use the Tor browser to connect to the website. With some luck you will be able to connect to the website.
Final Notes
I encourage to look the docker docs and the docker-compose docs . Learn how it works and become more confident with using docker. I hope you find this tutorial useful or interesting. Please note just using docker doesn't make your server safe. Please learn how to setup fire walls you can use to lock down your server.
— This is nullrequest signing off