Problem running tor services

Question

New to creating Tor_Hidden_Services. I created a website on Mobirise software and i wanted to run the site in Tor_Hidden_Services. I started with a tutorial from a friend which with his instructions, i Downloaded Oracle VirtualBox, then installed Ubuntu 20.

After moving the website files through Google drive account (Chrome browser) on my windows 10, i signed into the account using firefox on the Ubuntu Os then downloaded the file.

We started running this command in the terminal:

• sudo apt install nginx - Downloaded Nginx
• sudo nautilus - With permission granted, i was able to move the website file to the destination shown on the picture.
• sudo apt install tor - Installed tor services

• I went to my browser and typed http://localhost/ it displayed the website i wanted to run in tor.

• Now he told me to enter sudo gedit /etc/tor/torrc which showed the tor configurations in a text editor.

• In the text editior he told me to uncomment this here and there #HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/,#HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80 and to look like this...

############### This section is just for location-hidden services ###
HiddenServicePort x y:z says to redirect requests on port x to the
 address y:z.
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

After that i saved the file.

Having Problem Here - Then told me to Open terminal and type sudo tor and this was the result:

May 08 02:32:21.960 [notice] Tor 0.3.0.8 running on Linux with Libevent 2.1.11-stable, OpenSSL 1.1.1f, Zlib 1.2.11, Liblzma 5.2.4, and Libzstd 1.4.4.
May 08 02:32:21.961 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning
May 08 02:32:21.961 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
May 08 02:32:21.967 [warn] Directory /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ failed: Permission denied
May 08 02:32:21.967 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to configure rendezvous options. See logs for details.
May 08 02:32:21.967 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.

Please somebody help me out, i am stuck here and dont't know what next to do after, because the person helping me, has been off for days......

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Answer 1

The important line is:

May 08 02:32:21.967 [warn] Directory /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ failed: Permission denied

The Tor process checks the permissions of this directory and if they are wrong it fails. You can check them by opening your terminal and entering the command:

sudo ls -la /var/lib/tor/

There should be a line which ends with hidden_service:

drwx--S---  2 debian-tor debian-tor    4096 May  5 12:53 hidden_service

The first part of the line shows the permissions: drwx--S---. They are different in your output. So to solve this, enter the following command:

sudo chmod 2700 /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/

If you now enter sudo ls -la /var/lib/tor/ you should see the same permissions as above.

Furthermore I'd recommend to check the owner of the directory. Like in the output above it should list debian-tor as owner. If this is not the case change it by entering:

sudo chown debian-tor:debian-tor /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/

The last step is to restart your Tor process:

sudo systemctl restart tor

Now your hidden service should work. You can check the contents of /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname. The file lists the onion name. Enter this in your browser and you should see your web site.