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Troubleshooting

Basic check

If something is problematic, first try:

  • git pull and...
  • onionspray config <filename>.conf again, and then...
  • onionspray bounce -a

Logs

The logs for any given project will reside in projects/<PROJECTNAME>.d/logs.d/

Lots Of Broken Images, Missing Images, Missing CSS

This is probably an SSL/HTTPS thing.

Because of the nature of SSL self-signed certificates, you have to manually accept the certificate of each and every site for which a certificate has been created. See the second of the YouTube videos for some mention of this.

In short: this is normal and expected behaviour. You can temporarily fix this by:

  • Right-clicking on the image for Open In New Tab, and accepting the certificate
  • Or using Inspect Element > Network to find broken resources, and doing the same
  • Or -- if you know the list of domains in advance - visiting the /hello-onion/ URL for each of them, in advance, to accept certificates.

If you get an official SSL certificate for your onion site then the problem will vanish. Until then, I am afraid that you will be stuck playing certificate "whack-a-mole".

NGINX: Bad Gateway

Generally this means that NGINX cannot connect to the remote website, which usually happens because:

  • the site name in the config file, is wrong
  • the nginx daemon tries to do a DNS resolution, which fails

Check the NGINX logfiles in the directory cited above, for confirmation.

If DNS resolution is failing, PROBABLY the cause is probably lack of access to Google DNS / 8.8.8.8; therefore in your config file you should add a line like this - to use localhost as an example:

set nginx_resolver 127.0.0.1

... and then do:

onionspray stop -a
onionspray config filename.conf
onionspray start -a

If you need a local DNS resolver, I recommend dnsmasq.

I Can't Connect, It's Just Hanging!

If your onion project has just started, it can take up to a few minutes to connect for the first time; also sometimes Tor Browser caches stale descriptors for older onions. Try restarting Tor Browser (or use the New Identity menu item) and have a cup of tea. If it persists, check the logfiles.

OnionBalance Runs For A Few Days, And Then Just Stops Responding!

Is the clock/time of day correct on all your machines? Are you running NTP? We are not sure but having an incorrect clock may be a contributory factor to this issue.