How To Host an Onion Site and Chat Forum from AWS

Have you ever wanted to start you own onion site and create an anonymous messaging forum available to your TOR community?  I can help you setup exactly that with a free trier AWS EC2 instance or self hosted server in under an hour.

1) Spin up ubuntu 18.04 LTS instance (link here AWS EC2 ubuntu)

2) SSH to your AWS EC2 instance (link here on how to use putty and puttykeygen)

3) become root:

sudo -i

4) Setup Dependencies for TOR:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install apt-transport-https

Add these two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

deb https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org bionic main

deb-src https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org bionic main

Add the Tor PGP public key, and keep it up-to-date:

curl https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc | gpg --import

gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | apt-key add -

sudo apt update

sudo apt install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring

Now check your tor status:

sudo systemctl status tor.

Enable apt-over-tor:

sudo apt install apt-transport-tor

Edit and change the lines we added earlier in /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

deb tor://sdscoq7snqtznauu.onion/torproject.org bionic main

deb-src tor://sdscoq7snqtznauu.onion/torproject.org bionic main

check the package manager for any errors:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install tor

You should be error free... Now setup a firewall to only allow your ssh connection

sudo apt install ufw

ufw allow ssh 

Enable a firewall:

sudo ufw enable

Anonymous users like to spoof their server time zone:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Zurich

sudo timedatectl set-ntp on

Backup the original Tor config file:

sudo cp /etc/tor/torrc /etc/tor/torrc.orig

Edit /etc/tor/torrc and uncomment the following lines: (remove the #)

sudo vi /etc/tor/torrc

#HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/

#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

Restart Tor:

sudo systemctl restart tor



If you look in /var/lib/tor/hidden_service. You will see a hostname file that contains your TOR address (lettersandnumbers.onion). The folder also contains a public and private key for the tor service. Copy the contents of /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname and we'll use this info to setup our nginx host access.

Configuring Nginx

We’re using Nginx for our web server, the nginx-extras package utilized the Headers More module which makes it easy to include response headers:

sudo apt install nginx-extras

Edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf as root, and make sure to uncomment/add the lines below inside the http block.

sudo vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

server_tokens off;

server_name_in_redirect off;

port_in_redirect off;

Set up a document root for your hidden service

Here we create a document root, landing page, and blank page where all errors will redirect.

sudo mkdir /var/www/darkweb

echo 'Welcome to my onion site.' | sudo tee /var/www/darkweb/index.php

sudo touch /var/www/darkweb/error.html

sudo chmod 755 /var/www/darkweb

Remove the default server config:

sudo rm -vf /etc/nginx/sites-{available,enabled}/default

Create a new Nginx server config

Create and edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/80.darkweb.conf and remember to update the ser ver_name with your tor hostname from /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname.

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/80.darkweb.conf
server {
    listen 127.0.0.1:80;
    server_name lettersandnumbersfromhostfile.onion;
    more_set_headers 'Server: Secure';
    more_set_headers 'X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block';
    root /var/www/darkweb;
    index index.php index.html;
    error_page 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 421 422 423 424 425 426 428 429 431 451 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 510 511 /error.html;
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
    }
    location = /error.html {
        Internal;
    }
# phpBB (you only need this part if you want to setup phpBB)
 location /forum/ {
 try_files $uri $uri/ @rewriteapp;
 location ~ /(config\.php|common\.php|cache|files|images/avatars/upload|includes|(?<!ext/)phpbb|store|vendor) {
 deny all;
 }
 location ~ \.php(/|$) {
 include fastcgi.conf;
 fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
 fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY '';
 try_files $uri $uri/ /forum/app.php$is_args$args $document_root$fastcgi_script_name =404;
 fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
 }
 }
 location @rewriteapp {
 rewrite ^(.*)$ /forum/app.php/$1 last;
 }
 location /forum/install/ {
 try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite_installapp;
 location ~ \.php(/|$) {
 include fastcgi.conf;
 fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
 fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY '';
 try_files $uri $uri/ /forum/install/app.php$is_args$args $document_root$fastcgi_script_name =404;
 fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
 }
 }
 location @rewrite_installapp {
 rewrite ^(.*)$ /forum/install/app.php/$1 last;
 }

}

Setup MySQL

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql_secure_installation (follow the prompts)

Install PHP sudo apt-get install php-fpm php-mysql Edit php.ini and update/uncomment cgi.fix_pathinfo=0 sudo vi /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini cgi.fix_pathinfo=0 sudo systemctl restart php7.2-fpm

sudo systemctl restart nginx


You now have MySQL, PHP and a localhost listener on port 80 for your .onion address, nginx will server the content from the /var/www/darkweb and will redirect all errors to the blank error.html page. You can edit this in the future to harden or change your error and cross scripting prevention methods.

Make this configuration available to Nginx:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

sudo ln -s ../sites-available/80.darkweb.conf

Check the Nginx configuration and reload:

sudo nginx -t

sudo nginx -s reload

Restart Nginx :

sudo systemctl restart nginx


Setup PHPbb

sudo mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE phpbb;

CREATE USER 'phpbbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'SomePassCode#1';


GRANT ALL ON phpbb.* TO 'phpbbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'SomePassCode#1' WITH GRANT OPTION;


Sudo apt install unzip


cd /tmp && wget https://download.phpbb.com/pub/release/3.3/3.3.2/phpBB-3.3.2.zip

unzip phpBB-3.3.2.zip

sudo mv phpBB3 /var/www/darkweb/forum


sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/darkweb/forum

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/darkweb/forum


sudo apt-get install php-xml

sudo apt-get install php7.2-mbstring

Restart Nginx :

sudo systemctl restart nginx


Now if you launch TOR you should be able to view your homepage on youronionaddress.onion and follow the phpbb install at youronionaddress.onion/forum

Remember to remove the php install directory when you're done configuring your site.





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