Create A Website on Onion Domain

Lately, I’ve been playing around with ways to keep my online activity more private: onion domains. These are special websites you can access using the Tor network, and they keep both the site owner and visitors anonymous.

In this post, I’ll share how I made my own onion site. It was surprisingly easy, and I’ll walk you through everything step by step.

🧑‍💻 Step 1: Installing Tor

First, I installed Tor on my Linux machine. If you’re using Linux too, just run:

sudo apt install tor torsocks

Then, I started the Tor service:

sudo systemctl start tor

To check if it’s working:

sudo systemctl status tor

If it says “active (running)”, you’re good!

🔍 Step 2: Checking My IP

Before using Tor, I checked my regular IP address:

wget -qO - https://api.ipify.org; echo

Mine was something like:

103.105.71.193

Then I used Tor to check it again:

torsocks wget -qO - https://api.ipify.org; echo

This time it changed to:

185.220.101.77

That means Tor is working! 🎉

🌐 Step 3: Setting Up the Onion Website

To make my website available as an onion site, I just had to add a few lines to Tor’s config file. I opened the file:

sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc

Then added this at the bottom:

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/other_hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 localhost:80

This tells Tor to make a hidden service pointing to my local web server on port 80. After saving, I restarted Tor:

sudo systemctl restart tor

🧅 Step 4: Getting My Onion Address

Tor will create a folder with your new onion address. I just ran:

cat /var/lib/tor/other_hidden_service/hostname

And it gave me something like:

u6jmq7d6bgu5appup3u4qz6ugd57axho3ibaxa4vj7faakrzrkkoo5id.onion

That’s it — that’s my onion site! You can open it using the Tor Browser.