Installing Tor

Warning

This section refers to the older v2 codebase. Although outdated, it's still available for historic purposes.

Installing and Configuring Tor

Tor is need on the management server and every backend onion service instance.

Management Server

Onionbalance requires that a recent version of Tor (>= 0.2.7.1-alpha) is installed on the management server system. This version might not be available in your operating system's repositories yet.

It is recommended that you install Tor from the Tor Project repositories to ensure you stay up to date with the latest Tor releases.

The management server need to have its control port enabled to allow the Onionbalance daemon to talk to the Tor process. This can be done by uncommenting the ControlPort option in your torrc configuration file.

Alternatively you can replace your torrc file with this one suitable for the Tor instance on the management server.

After configuring Tor you should restart your Tor process

$ sudo service tor reload

Backend Instances

Each backend instance should be run a standard onion service which serves your website or other content. More information about configuring onion services is available in the Tor Project's Onion Service configuration guide.

If you have used the onionbalance-config tool you should transfer the generated instance config files and keys to the Tor configuration directory on the backend servers. [Example torrc-instance-v3][].

After configuring Tor you should restart your Tor process:

$ sudo service tor reload

Now that Tor is installed and configured, please move to Running Onionbalance.