How to generate a custom v3 onion address

If anyone was curious how I generated a custom v3 onion address for our forum I used https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o

On debian it's quite easy to run, here's the commands for the lazy

apt install gcc libc6-dev libsodium-dev make autoconf libssl-dev -y
git clone https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o
cd mkp224o
bash ./autogen.sh
./configure
make
./mkp224o -d something -s some

Replace "something" with the output directory and "some" with what charcters you want the onion address to start with. I'm also using the -s flag to print out stats.

How long it takes to generate an onion depends on your CPU. Every character increases the generation time exponentially and anything beyond 9 characters is probably impossible.

One you've generated one just setup Tor how you normally would

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

Then over write /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hs_ed25519_secret_key with the contents of the hs_ed25519_secret_key file in your something/onion directory.

Also delete /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hs_ed25519_public_key and /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname

And restart tor