OpenShifTor

Tor cartridge for OpenShift. Make your application accessible as a Tor Hidden Service! (You will get cool .onion address.)

Example

To save you of long preambles, let us just dive into example where we will create hidden service for diy-based application:

appname=hidden
rhc app create "${appname}" --no-git \
    diy \
    'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xkollar/tor-openshift/master/metadata/manifest.yml' \
    --from-code 'https://github.com/xkollar/openshiftor-example.git'

And that is all... you just have to wait till Tor builds and starts for the first time (this is done asynchronously and it takes some time so be patient).

Take note of the .onion hostname that was generated for your service. If you forgot that (or you want to supply your own key), appropriate places to look are "${OPENSHIFT_TOR_DIR}tor/hidden_service/hostname" and "${OPENSHIFT_TOR_DIR}tor/hidden_service/private_key".

If you want to check whether you was successful but you do not want to install Tor yourselves, you can use some Tor gateway, e.g. tor2web.org.

Integration notes

When using with your own cartridge make sure that your application use variables in form *_PORT and *_IP or *_ADDRESS so this cartridge will know where to forward requests. For example diy cartridge uses OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP and OPENSHIFT_DIY_PORT.

To prevent Tor from restarting (that causes .hidden site inavailability for some time) use keep_tor_running marker.

touch .openshift/markers/keep_tor_running
git add .openshift/markers/keep_tor_running
git commit -m 'Keep Tor running'
git push

Note

There is more to Hidden services. Before doing anything, you should probably educate yourself a little. Good starting points:

• https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
• https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en
• https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love

Also, when you want to run this gear at servers that are not yours, be sure to read terms and conditions of host, e.g. https://www.openshift.com/legal. This cartridge is intended to provide possibility to access your application via .onion hostname, not to hide anything bad. Also by running this service on machine that you are not the only one to manage, you may expose your users to unpredictable dangers.