Hello all, I would like to configure Discourse to be a Tor hidden service using nginx. Here is the configuration that I am trying in nginx (it doesn’t work, “server not found”): server { listen unix:/var/run/nginx-onion.sock; server_name prostadqmwc6no3n.onion; location / { pro…

Did you look at Template for serving through an .onion address with Docker ?

Did you find a solution? Also how’d you get Discourse it self up and running in tocker for a .onion address? (I want a forum available through tor only)

Yes, here is the working configuration. The problem was pretty simple, it was that originally I tried to use a socket to serve the site, but this didn’t work, so I had to use a port. server { listen 801; server_name 127.0.0.1; location / { proxy_pass http://unix:/var/discourse/sh…

Thanks for your quick reply! Another question; what are your server specs(and for what userbase?) / have you made any changes for preformance over tor? Thanks in advance!

It’s a 2Gb Digital Ocean VM with 105 users. We didn’t make any modifications (except a plugin to allow us to serve it over tor and clearweb simultaneously).

Another question, do you have any issues with user images (like background card, profile banner, etc) taking a really long time to load (I suppose this is because of tor). After it’s cached though it shows it just fine.

I’m not exactly sure how tor user addresses work. But for me all the user logged ip’s show as 127.0.0.1 which I’d expect but I have set the x-forwarded-for header in nginx. I’m not sure whether tor users have something similar to an ip over the tor network itself, and how I get this to show.

Might need to use set_real_ip_from

Nginx configuration for Discourse forum over Tor

Support Self-hosting

prostasia (Prostasia Foundation) December 21, 2019, 5:08pm 3

Yes but honestly I can’t make head or tail of it and it seems an over-complicated approach for what I need, which is just a working nginx configuration.

Topic		Replies	Views
How would one go about setting up discourse for tor? Self-hosting	4	1048	April 22, 2020
Template for serving through an .onion address with Docker Development	7	3765	April 20, 2020
How to create mirror in Tor with .onion domain? Self-hosting	8	1676	June 29, 2025
Nginx + discourse Self-hosting	9	8410	February 8, 2016
Mirror forum on Tor Self-hosting	3	764	November 28, 2021

Nginx configuration for Discourse forum over Tor

Related topics