Jul 17, 2018 • liew211
I have recently learned about using Tor to allow a Raspberry Pi to be accessed remotely, and have implemented this with Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a file-storage service similar to Dropbox, or Google Drive, but hosted privately from your own Raspberry Pi. By using Tor to open up the port occupied by Nextcloud, you will be able to access it without needing to be on the same Wifi network, which enhances Nextcloud's collaborative features, such as file-sharing and messaging.
Download the latest treehouses image from http://download.treehouses.io, then use balenaEtcher to flash the image onto your SD card. Be sure to change balenaEtcher's settings to prevent it from automatically unmounting the SD card once it's done flashing.
In your file explorer, navigate to the boot drive, and open the autorunonce file in a text editor of your choice. Delete everthing, and paste this in:
#!/bin/bash
treehouses rename treehouses
treehouses expandfs
treehouses button bluetooth
treehouses bridge 'wifiname' 'treehouses' 'wifipassword'
rebootReplace wifiname and wifipassword with your wifi name and password. Save the file, and safely eject the SD card.
You should already have Homebrew installed. You can check if it's already installed by running brew -v in your terminal. If you haven't yet installed it, run the following:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install wget
Then, install Tor and Tor Browser:
brew install tor
brew cask install tor-browser
Install Tor
Plug the microSD into your Raspberry Pi, and power it on. The red LED should turn on, indicating that the Raspberry Pi is connected to power. Once the green LED next to it on your Raspberry Pi stabilizes into a solid green, you should see "treehouses" appear in available Wifi networks. Connect to it, and make sure that you have an internet connection by opening up another web page.
Find the Raspberry Pi's IP address in your network settings (it will probably be 192.168.2.1). Open up your terminal or command prompt, and run ssh root@[IP address] to enter the root of your Pi. Run
docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name nextcloud --restart=unless-stopped nextcloud
to pull the Docker image for Nextcloud, and start up the container - this will take a few minutes. To check if the container is running, run docker ps:
root@treehouses:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b9484a8d681e nextcloud "/entrypoint.sh apac…" 12 minutes ago Up 12 minutes 0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp nextcloudNow that the container has been created, you can stop and start it with docker stop nextcloud and docker start nextcloud. To view all running and stopped containers, run docker ps -a.
As we have run Nextcloud on port 8080, that's the port that we will have to open up with Tor. While still in the root of treehouses, run treehouses tor add 80 8080, then run treehouses tor to find the tor address. You should see something like this:
root@treehouses:~# treehouses tor add 80 8080
Success: the port has been added
root@treehouses:~# treehouses tor
b3pesvpay2ouaxl556jwbknf32qlurspdregg672lgm5wjk5gejuonid.onionIn the Tor browser on your computer, navigate to the .onion address. For instance, I would navigate to b3pesvpay2ouaxl556jwbknf32qlurspdregg672lgm5wjk5gejuonid.onion in my Tor browser. If the Nextcloud container is up and running, you should see the Nextcloud set up page:
After you have created an admin account and logged in, you can play around with the settings, add users, install apps to augment your Nextcloud experience, and more. As long as your Raspberry Pi is connected to internet, and the Docker container is running, you will be able to access Nextcloud through the same Tor address (if you forget it, you can always ssh into your Pi and run treehouses tor).
Thank you for reading, and happy hacking!