mjfer.net

This might sound spooky and complicated, but it's really not. If you want to host a small site or a small file share among friends, I honestly think Tor is one of the easiest and safest options to set up.

Getting a Tor hidden service running is so stupidly easy that it hardly deserves it's own article. Tor's website has a great guide right here. I figured I'd put my own spin on it by showing you show to host a temporary server to share some files with your friends. Please note the word temporary in that last sentence; running this way for a while is insecure and not a good idea. For a permanent solution, you'll want to host a real web server as explained here.

Like that article, I will only explain how to do this on Linux since it's way easier and, to be honest, I've never tried to do it on Windows. If you've never used Linux before, buy a Raspberry Pi and follow the basic install guide. If you're strapped for cash, run it in a virtual machine, or use Windows Subsystem for Linux.

How to spin up a temporary hidden file share with Python

Once you have Debian/Ubuntu/whatever installed and it's updated to your liking, you can install Tor with:

$ sudo apt install tor

Start (or stop) Tor with:

$ sudo service tor start

or

$ sudo systemctl start tor.service

You may need to enable the service first. I think this is done by default now, but it doesn't hurt:

$ sudo systemctl enable tor.service

Configure Tor

You'll need to edit the file "/etc/tor/torrc" before your service can be available over Tor. Use vim, nano, or whatever you like to edit the file (as root!) and search for the following lines:

#HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

Remove the '#' at the beginning of each and change the port to 8000 like so:

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8000

Save and restart Tor for the changes to apply:

$ sudo service tor restart

Once you do this, you'll get a new onion address located in the directory noted above. Use cat to read the hostname file and copy it down somewhere. This is your ".onion" address:

$ cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname

Set up the server

Make some directory to hold your files.

$ mkdir -pv ~/files

If you're on WSL you can copy files from your C drive like so:

$ cp -vr /mnt/c/Users/username/Desktop/cats ~/files/

On a remote server (like a Raspberry pi) you can use scp instead (replace 'rapsberry' with the hostname or local IP of you Pi):

$ scp -vr cats pi@raspberry:~/files/

Since we're only doing this temporarily, we don't care too much about security or where the files should go, but if you want to be careful, you can issue the following to set the directory to read only after you copy your files in:

$ chmod -R 644 files

Change into the directory and run Python's built-in http server:

$ cd files
$ python3 -m http.server

You'll see the server is being hosted on port 8000, which is what we chose in the config file earlier. Just leave it running, or send it to the background with Ctrl+Z and run "bg".

And that's it! You are now the proud owner of a tor hidden service. Take the hostname you copied down before and add ".onion" to the end and give it to your friends so they can browse the files in the directory through the Tor Browser.

Be sure to watch the program log though... lest they get up to no good.

Go up to parent folder (/tutorials/tor)