General Information:

This is a setup for a Tor based shared hosting server. It is provided as is and before putting it into production you should make changes according to your needs. This is a work in progress and you should carefully check the commit history for changes before updating. For a production server, at least 1TB of SSD disk space, 32GB RAM and 8 CPU cores is recommended. For a small testing/personal server, 4GB RAM and 1 CPU core is enough.

Translation:

Translations are managed in Weblate. If you prefer manually submitting translations, the script update-translations.sh can be used to update the language template and translation files from source. It will generate the file var/www/locale/hosting.pot which you can then use as basis to create a new language file in var/www/YOUR_LANG_CODE/LC_MESSAGES/hosting.po and edit it with a translation program, such as Poedit. Once you are done, you can open a pull request, or email me, to include the translation.

Installation Instructions:

The configuration was tested with a standard Debian bookworm and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS installation. It's recommended you install Debian bookworm (or newer) on your server, but with a little tweaking you may also get this working on other distributions and/or versions. If you want to build it on a raspberry pi, please do not use the raspbian images as several things will break. Download an image for your pi model from https://raspi.debian.net/daily-images/ instead.

Because I regularly get asked to make a video tutorial on how to set this up, I decided to create a tutorial which you can watch on YouTube. It is basically just copy-pasting commands, but maybe it helps someone.

Uninstall packages that may interfere with this setup:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt purge -y apache2* dnsmasq* eatmydata exim4* imagemagick-6-common mysql-client* mysql-server* nginx* libnginx-mod* php7* resolvconf && systemctl disable systemd-resolved.service && systemctl stop systemd-resolved.service

If you have problems resolving hostnames after this step, temporarily switch to a public nameserver like 1.1.1.1 (from CloudFlare) or 8.8.8.8 (from Google)

rm /etc/resolv.conf && echo "nameserver 1.1.1.1" > /etc/resolv.conf

Add additional repositories:

apt update && apt install git apt-transport-tor curl
curl -sSL https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/torproject.gpg
curl -sSL https://packages.sury.org/nginx/apt.gpg > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sury.gpg
echo "deb tor://apow7mjfryruh65chtdydfmqfpj5btws7nbocgtaovhvezgccyjazpqd.onion/torproject.org/ `lsb_release -cs` main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/nginx/ `lsb_release -cs` main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt update && apt upgrade

Install git and clone this repository

apt update && apt install git && git clone https://github.com/DanWin/hosting && cd hosting

Install custom optimized binaries

./install_binaries.sh

Note that debian also has an onion service package archive, so you may want to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to load from there instead:

deb tor://2s4yqjx5ul6okpp3f2gaunr2syex5jgbfpfvhxxbbjwnrsvbk5v3qbid.onion/debian `lsb_release -cs` main

Copy (and modify according to your needs) the site files in var/www to /var/www and the configuration files in etc to /etc after installation has finished. Then restart some services:

systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl restart bind9.service && systemctl restart tor@default.service

Replace the default .onion domain with your domain:

sed -i "s/dhosting4xxoydyaivckq7tsmtgi4wfs3flpeyitekkmqwu4v4r46syd.onion/`cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname`/g" /etc/postfix/sql/alias.cf /etc/postfix/sender_login_maps /etc/postfix/main.cf /var/www/skel/www/index.hosting.html /var/www/common.php /etc/postfix/canonical /etc/postfix-clearnet/canonical /var/www/html/squirrelmail/config/config.php

For your clearnet domain, you need to add it to relay_domains in /etc/postfix/main.cf and edit the default domain in the following files:

/var/www/common.php
/etc/postfix/canonical
/etc/postfix-clearnet/canonical

This setup has two postfix instances, one for receiving and sending mail to other .onion services and one for rewriting addresses to pass them on to a clearnet facing mail relay. You may or may not want to create the second instance by running

postmulti -e init
postmulti -I postfix-clearnet -e create
postmulti -i clearnet -e enable
postmulti -i clearnet -p start

If you created an instance, uncomment the clearnet relay related config in etc/postfix/main.cf and make sure to copy and modify the configuration files from etc/postfix-clearnet too

If you encountered the following issue: postfix: fatal: chdir(/var/spool/postfix-clearnet): No such file or directory you can just copy the chroot from the default postfix instance like this cd /var/spool/ && cp -a postfix/ postfix-clearnet/

After copying (and modifying) the posfix configuration, you need to create databases out of the mapping files (also each time you update those files):

postalias /etc/aliases
postmap /etc/postfix/canonical /etc/postfix/sender_login_maps /etc/postfix/transport
postmap /etc/postfix-clearnet/canonical /etc/postfix-clearnet/sasl_password /etc/postfix-clearnet/transport #only if you have a second instance

To save temporary files in memory, add the following to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
tmpfs /var/log/nginx tmpfs rw,user,noatime 0 0

To harden the system and hide pids from non-root users, also add the following:

proc /proc proc defaults,hidepid=2 0 0

And add the noatime,usrjquota=aquota.user,jqfmt=vfsv1 options to the /home mountpoint, then initialize quota. Replace /home with /, if you do not have a separate partition:

systemctl daemon-reload
mount -o remount $(findmnt -n -o TARGET --target /home)
quotacheck -cMu $(findmnt -n -o TARGET --target /home)
quotaon $(findmnt -n -o TARGET --target /home)

In some cases, you might get an error, that quota is not supported. This is usually the case in virtual environments. Make sure you have the full kernel installed, not one with a -virtual package. They usually are linux-image-amd64, linux-image-arm64 or linux-image-generic, depending on your distribution. Also make sure, you are running a real virtual machine (e.g. KVM). Some providers sell containerized VPSes (e.g. OpenVZ), which means you don't run your own kernel...

Install sodium_compat for v3 hidden_service support

cd /var/www && composer install

Create a mysql user for phpmyadmin and cofigure it in /var/www/html/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and fill $cfg['blowfish_secret'] with random characters:

mysql
CREATE USER 'phpmyadmin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'MY_PASSWORD';
CREATE DATABASE phpmyadmin;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON phpmyadmin.* TO 'phpmyadmin'@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit
mysql phpmyadmin < /var/www/html/phpmyadmin/sql/create_tables.sql

Create a mysql user with all permissions for our hosting management:

mysql
CREATE USER 'hosting'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'MY_PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'hosting'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Then edit the database configuration in /var/www/common.php and /etc/postfix/sql/alias.cf

Last but not least setup the database by running

php /var/www/setup.php

Enable systemd timers to regularly run various managing tasks:

systemctl enable hosting-del.timer && systemctl enable hosting.timer

Final step is to reboot wait about 5 minutes for all services to start and check if everything is working by creating a test account.