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How to redirect your clearnet audience to the Darknet

TLDR: by using the "gone-underground" project that I developed, you can redirect your clearnet audience to the darknet mirror of your websites, while also telling them to install the Tor browser

If you've read my tutorial on how the darknet was superior to the clearnet, you may be faced with this dilemma: "how do I make sure that my audience follows me from the clearnet to the darknet ?"

In this tutorial i'm going to show you how i have been redirecting the clearnet audience of the nowhere community to the darknet.

First of all, take note that you should not have the clearnet presence of your website on the same server as the darknet mirror, in case if it's a sensitive service:

alt text

Why is this important ?

This is is because it is EASY for an adversary to take down your clearnet domain, and servers, simply because their locations are known, and thus, are easily subpoenable. Your sensitive service should be able to survive clearnet-related takedowns and still survive, unlike what happened to XSS.is:

alt text

XSS.is was a black hat hacking forum, whose main forum service was clearnet-based, and their onion mirror was just a proxy to the clearnet one), meaning that in the end their service did not survive the clearnet presence takedown.

TLDR: if you want to have a sensitive service going, don't make it easy to take down by the adversary. Make sure that the main instance of the service sits on an onion-only darknet presence, and ensure that the clearnet presence remains completely separated from it, on a separate VPS, ready to be taken down without affecting the service.

The gone-underground php project

First, install the following dependencies on your server: 

root@nowhere:/srv#  apt install nginx curl php8.2-fpm socat -y

Then, git clone the following repository in /srv/ :

root@nowhere:/srv# cd /srv/
root@nowhere:/srv# torsocks git clone http://gdatura24gtdy23lxd7ht3xzx6mi7mdlkabpvuefhrjn4t5jduviw5ad.onion/nihilist/gone-underground

then, edit your nginx website config to be as follows:

root@nowhere:/srv# cat /etc/nginx/sites-available/nowhere.conf
server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name nowhere.moe;
        return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}


server {
set $oniondomain "http://nowherejezfoltodf4jiyl6r56jnzintap5vyjlia7fkirfsnfizflqd.onion";

        add_header Onion-Location $oniondomain always;
        ######## TOR CHANGES ########

        listen 443 ssl http2;
        listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
        server_name nowhere.moe;
        ssl_certificate /root/.acme.sh/nowhere.moe/fullchain.cer;
        ssl_certificate_key /root/.acme.sh/nowhere.moe/nowhere.moe.key;


# SSL Settings


        access_log  off;
            error_log off;


        ###### WE'VE GONE UNDERGROUND PART ####
        root /srv/gone-underground/;
        location / {
            try_files $uri /underground.php;
        }

        #location ~ ^(.*)$ {
        location ~ \.php$ {
            rewrite ^ /underground.php break;
            include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
            fastcgi_param X-Onion-Location $oniondomain;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        }

}

Take note that the important part of this nginx config is the $oniondomain variable, as this is the onion mirror to which your audience will be redirected to.

Then, if you didn't do it already, make sure that you get a HTTPS certificate for the clearnet presence of your website:

root@nowhere:/srv# wget -O -  https://get.acme.sh | sh
root@nowhere:/srv# acme.sh --set-default-ca  --server  letsencrypt
root@nowhere:/srv# acme.sh --issue --standalone -d  nowhere.moe -k 4096

Then, make sure that the nginx configuration is active:

root@nowhere:/srv# rm /etc/nginx/sites-*/default
root@nowhere:/srv# ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/nowhere.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
root@nowhere:/srv# nginx -s reload

And lastly check that the redirection is happening as expected:

alt text

As you can see, it redirected us to the onion mirror of the website properly:

alt text

And that's it! you now know how to redirect your clearnet audience to your darknet websites without weakening your operational security.


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Anonymous 2025-08-10
Donate XMR to the author:
8C1MNeB4KEHGApg6sPxFPn3NWERD3mPv7AjC8mCm1CJCXjoKnf36SYBdZ6ywCMdZRC4cxu7Uax3tufDqMXS2mLvHNCJzQZS