Important information:

Running your own hidden service can be dangerous. Be sure to read these pages first if you are not just experimenting with hidden services:

• Configuring Onion Services for Tor
• Operational Security
• Best Practices for Hosting Onion Services

These are all external links. We do not monitor the content for accuracy, changes and availability

How to install manually:

Note: You can download your keys in a bundle that covers step 1 to 3

1. Create an empty directory
2. Create a file named hostname with the content .onion
3. Create a file named private_key with the private key as content
4. Add the line HiddenServiceDir path to your tor configuration where path is the full path to the directory you created
5. To forward a port, add a line in the format HiddenServicePort FakePort IP:RealPort directly after the previous line to the configuration.
6. Repeat step 5 for each port this tor service should be accessible
7. Reload your tor configuration

Notes on step 5:

Tor will only forward ports for which a HiddenServicePort directive is given.

• FakePort is the port the client is using. For a website, use 80
• IP is the local IP address your hidden service is listening. If it runs on the same machine as your tor client. Use 127.0.0.1
• RealPort is the real port your application is listening on. For simple scenarios, this is likely the same as FakePort

Example: HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080 will make a web server running on local port 8080 accessible through tor under the normal HTTP port (80)

Notes on step 7:
The simplest way to reload the configuration is to restart the tor client. If you know how, you can send the signal SIGHUP to the tor client to reload the configuration without having to restart it.

Important information:

This test will only work with hidden web services. Other services (ssh, irc, ...) and public websites can't be tested.

Before starting the test, please work through the checklist:

• The application you want to make accessible through tor is running and can be reached from the machine it runs on. This means you can access the IP:RealPort (see step 5 in "Name Generator" tab) from the machine that runs said application.
• Tor hidden service is configured in the tor client (see "Name Generator" tab)
• Tor client has been running for at least a minute after the hidden service was enabled