[tor-talk] New Document: Building a "Proof of Concept" Onion Site

[Alec Muffett]

One of the questions I get asked lots is "How [do I] set up a Onion site to
be an Onion equivalent to my [normal WWW website]?"

Some people call these "onion mirrors" or "onion copies" of [a website] -
but I feel that those are narrow, perjorative and incorrect descriptions.

Some websites you access over HTTP, some over HTTPS, and nowadays some of
them you will access over Onions.

So, for me these are "Websites accessed over Onions" - or simply "Onion
Sites" because I am old enough to remember "$PROTOCOL sites" for values of
$PROTOCOL including: https, http, gopher, ftp...

But how do you set them up?  It's pretty simple and I am documenting and
testing a process.

The first of (probably several) documents has been posted at:


https://github.com/alecmuffett/the-onion-diaries/blob/master/building-proof-of-concept.md

...and has been written for people who are comfy setting up a simple Ubuntu
Server instance in a virtualised environment or on (say) AWS.

The goal of the document is to build an educational, non-production-quality
"playpen" onion site which uses "man in the middle" request-and-response
rewriting to make a normal website available as an onion site; this is not
a technique that I would typically recommend for production use* - but it's
great for messing around, learning, and starting to see how Onions are set
up.

If you like the document and would like to see some prior discussion and
diagrams, read also:

    https://storify.com/AlecMuffett/tor-tips

My next document will probably drill into the matter of how subdomains work
with onion sites, and how to modify the process from the first document to
experiment with supporting multiple subdomains.

    - alec


* although last time I checked I think, Ubuntu and perhaps ProPublica were
doing this, but rather more professionally than I describe here.

-- 
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm