TorStatus

Web application listing Tor nodes running at https://torstatus.rueckgr.at/. Initially developed by Joseph B. Kowalski.

Docker-based setup (recommended)

Prerequisites

• Git
• Docker together with Docker compose

Steps

• Clone the repository.
• Create the Docker network torstatus using docker create network torstatus.
• Run docker compose build from the root of your repository clone.
• Run docker compose up to start everything.
• Wait for the updater to finish (it will log Script successful, waiting 900 seconds...).
• Point your browser to https://localhost:8765.

Things to note

• The first start-up will take more time as the database needs to be initialized.
• As long as the database is not up, the updater will complain about not being able to connect to the database. This is fine; as soon as the database is up, the updater will connect to it and start running.
• The first run of the updater after every startup will take longer than the subsequent runs. This is because memcached has not yet been initialized.
• The tor process will complain about its control port being accessible from non-local addresses. This warning can be ignored as it is only accessible from the containers of the TorStatus application.
• All containers feature a health check that you can observe, e.g. using docker ps.

Environment variables

• REAL_SERVER_IP: The public IPv4 address of the TorStatus instance. Used for determining whether a certain Tor exit node will allow connecting to this TorStatus instance.
• HIDDEN_SERVICE_URL: self-explanatory

Reverse proxy

If you intend run a web server as a reverse proxy in front of TorStatus, there are two options where to forward incoming requests: Either to nginx or to PHP-FPM.

Forward requests to nginx

The nginx container exposes port 8765. You can forward requests there, e.g. in Apache with mod_proxy:

ProxyPass / https://127.0.0.1:8765/
ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:8765/

The disadvantage of this approach is that requests to PHP files will be forwarded twice, once by your reverse proxy and once by nginx in the nginx container. To avoid this, use the below approach to directly forward PHP requests to PHP-FPM.

Forward requests to PHP-FPM

The php-fpm container exposes port 9001. You can have your reverse proxy handle static content from the nginx/web directory and forward requests for PHP files to that port, e.g. in Apache:

<FilesMatch ".+\.ph(ar|p|tml)$">
  ProxyFCGISetEnvIf "true" SCRIPT_FILENAME "/var/www/html%{reqenv:SCRIPT_NAME}"
  SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9001"
</FilesMatch>

Hidden services

• The directory tor/hidden_services will be mounted at /var/lib/tor/hidden_services inside the container. Place the files for your hidden services there.
• Add a file to the tor/torrc.d directory configuring your hidden services using the HiddenService* directives. Use /var/lib/tor/hidden_services/... for HiddenServiceDir and keep the above mount in mind.

Logging

• All containers' logs are sent to journald.

Setup without docker

Tor

• You need access to a running Tor daemon (client, middle node, exit node).
• Configure a control port with a password (settings ControlPort and HashedControlPassword in torrc).
• Additionally, set UseMicrodescriptors to 0 in torrc.

memcached

Set up an instance of memcached.

MariaDB

Set up MariaDB, create a database with a user, and populate the database using mariadb/sql/install.sql.

Web application

• Copy nginx/web/config_template.php to config.php and modify it to your needs.
• Set up a web server with PHP support (e.g. Apache or nginx with PHP-FPM).
• You will need the PHP modules memcached, mysqli, and gd.
• Configure your web server (or a separate vhost) to serve content from nginx/web.

Updater

• Set up Perl.
• You need these CPAN modules: DBI PHP::Serialization LWP::Simple File::Touch Parallel::ForkManager Cache::Memcached Net::IP DBD::MariaDB
• cd to the directory updater and invoke tns_update.pl there.
• Use Cron to invoke tns_update.pl regularly. Alternatively, you may launch updater.sh once after each reboot.