Configuring Hidden Services for Tor
Tor allows clients and servers to offer hidden services. That is, you can offer a web server, SSH server, etc., without revealing your IP to its users. In fact, because you don't need any public address, you can run a hidden service from behind your firewall.
This howto describes the steps for setting up your own hidden service website.
Step Zero: Get Tor and Privoxy working
Before you start, you need to make sure 1) Tor is up and running, 2) Privoxy is up and running, 3) Privoxy is configured to point to Tor, and 4) You actually set it up correctly.
Windows users should follow the Windows howto, and OS X users should follow the OS X howto. Other users can find some hints here.
Once you've got Tor and Privoxy installed and configured, you can see hidden services in action by clicking on the hidden wiki in your browser. It will typically take 10-60 seconds to load (or to decide that it is currently unreachable). If it fails immediately and your browser pops up an alert saying that that "www.6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion could not be found, please check the name and try again" then you haven't configured Tor and Privoxy correctly; see this FAQ entry for some help.
Step One: Configure an example hidden service
In this step, you're going to configure a hidden service that points to www.google.com. This way we can make sure you've gotten this step working before we start thinking about setting up a web server locally.
First, open your torrc file in your favorite text editor. (See this
FAQ entry to learn what this means.) Go to the middle section and
look for the line
############### This section is just for location-hidden services ###
This section of the file consists of groups of lines, each representing one hidden service. Right now they are all commented out (the lines start with #), so now hidden services are enabled. Each group of lines consists of one HiddenServiceDir line, and one or more HiddenServicePort lines:
- HiddenServiceDir is a directory where Tor will store information about that hidden service. In particular, Tor will create a file here named hostname which will tell you the onion URL. You don't need to add any files to this directory.
- HiddenServicePort lets you specify a virtual port (that is, what port people accessing the hidden service will think they're using) and an IP address and port for redirecting connections to this virtual port.
In this example, we're going to set up a hidden service that points to Google. So add the following lines to your torrc:
HiddenServiceDir /home/yourname/hidserv/ HiddenServicePort 80 www.google.com:80
The above directory is for Windows people. OS X or Unix people should use /tmp/hidserv instead.
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