// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Self-Hosting on the Dark Web
This site is now reachable over Tor as a hidden service, at a .onion
address that resolves only inside the Tor network.1 1
Open it in the
Tor Browser. There is no certificate authority, no DNS, and no exposed
IP—the address is derived directly from a public key, and the
connection is end-to-end encrypted by Tor itself.
Tor relays and
encrypts your traffic as it passes through thousands of volunteer-run
servers, so that no single party can link who you are to what you are
doing; a hidden service extends that anonymity to the server itself.
It’s built by the nonprofit Tor Project, which advances human rights and
freedoms through free software and open networks, so that anyone can use
the internet free from tracking, surveillance, and censorship. The
network only works because people use it, so consider supporting them or
running a relay—your contribution helps millions stay safe and private
online every day.
Install Tor and point a hidden service at a local port. Edit
/etc/tor/torrc
The directory must be a dedicated, Tor-owned path—not your web
root.2 2
Tor stores the service’s private key and hostname file here
and insists on owning it (chmod 700, user debian-tor). Point it at
your site files and Tor refuses to start.
Restart Tor and read the
address it generates
Tor forwards the onion’s port 80 to 127.0.0.1:8080, so the web server
just needs to listen there. Add an nginx server block for it—no TLS,
no HTTP/2, no QUIC, since Tor speaks plain TCP and provides its own
encryption.
A static site bakes its base URL into absolute links, so a clearnet
build would point visitors back to the clearnet domain even when served
over Tor. The fix is to build a second copy with the onion as its base
URL
The deploy pipeline does this automatically: every push builds the site
once per target—clearnet and Tor—and rsyncs each to its own web
root, so the two stay in sync without any manual work.3 3
See First
Steps on a New Server for the underlying machine; the full configuration
lives in my homelab repository, and the site’s own repository holds the
GitHub Actions workflow that builds and deploys the Tor copy.
That’s it. Read this site over Tor at
dhevt6e4rtgbtr3jh53xrpwmgtilkah6nyjujocsspssrsexc7omxhid.onion.