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Running your own TON proxy

The aim of this document is to provide a gentle introduction into TON Sites, which are websites accessed through the TON Network. TON Sites may be used as a convenient entry point for other TON Services. In particular, HTML pages downloaded from TON Sites may contain links to ton://... URIs representing payments that can be performed by the user by clicking on the link, provided a TON Wallet is installed on the user's device.

From the technical perspective, TON Sites are very much like standard websites, but they are accessed through the TON Network (which is an overlay network inside the Internet) instead of the Internet. More specifically, they have an ADNL Address (instead of a more customary IPv4 or IPv6 address) and they accept HTTP queries via a RLDP protocol (which is a higher-level RPC protocol built upon ADNL, the main protocol of TON Network) instead of the usual TCP/IP. All encryption is handled by ADNL, so there is no need to use HTTPS (i.e. TLS) in case the entry proxy is hosted locally on the user's device.

In order to access existing sites and create new TON Sites one needs special gateways between the "ordinary" internet and the TON Network. Essentially, TON Sites are accessed with the aid of a HTTP->RLDP proxy running locally on the client's machine and they are created by means of a reverse RLDP->HTTP proxy running on a remote web server.

Read more about TON Sites, WWW, and Proxy

Running an entry proxy​

In order to access existing TON Sites, you need to run a RLDP-HTTP Proxy on your computer.

  1. Download rldp-http-proxy from TON Auto Builds.

    Or you can compile the rldp-http-proxy yourself by following these instructions.

  2. Download TON global config.

  3. Run rldp-http-proxy

    rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -p 8080 -c 3333 -C global.config.json

In the above example, 8080 is the TCP port that will be listened to at localhost for incoming HTTP queries, and 3333 is the UDP port that will be used for all outbound and inbound RLDP and ADNL activity (i.e. for connecting to TON Sites via the TON Network). global.config.json is the filename of TON global config.

If you have done everything correctly, the entry proxy will not terminate, but it will continue running in the terminal. It can now be used for accessing TON Sites. When you don't need it anymore, you can terminate it by pressing Ctrl-C, or simply by closing the terminal window.

Your entry proxy will be available by HTTP on localhost port 8080.

Running an entry proxy on a remote computer​

  1. Download rldp-http-proxy from TON Auto Builds.

    Or you can compile the rldp-http-proxy yourself by following these instructions.

  2. Download TON global config.

  3. Download generate-random-id from TON Auto Builds.

    Or you can compile the generate-random-id yourself by following these instructions.

  4. Generate a persistent ANDL Address for your entry proxy

    mkdir keyring

    utils/generate-random-id -m adnlid

    You will see something like

    45061C1D4EC44A937D0318589E13C73D151D1CEF5D3C0E53AFBCF56A6C2FE2BD vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3

    This is your newly-generated persistent ADNL Address, in hexadecimal and user-friendly form. The corresponding private key is saved into file 45061...2DB in the current directory. Move key into the keyring directory

    mv 45061C1* keyring/

  5. Run rldp-http-proxy

    rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -p 8080 -a <your_public_ip>:3333 -C global.config.json -A <your_adnl_address>

    where <your_public_ip> is your public IPv4 address and <your_adnl_address> is the ADNL Address generated in the previous step.

    Example:

    rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -p 8080 -a 777.777.777.777:3333 -C global.config.json -A vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3

    In the above example, 8080 is the TCP port that will be listened to at localhost for incoming HTTP queries, and 3333 is the UDP port that will be used for all outbound and inbound RLDP and ADNL activity (i.e. for connecting to TON Sites via the TON Network). global.config.json is the filename of TON global config.

If you have done everything correctly, the Proxy will not terminate, but it will continue running in the terminal. It can be used now for accessing TON Sites. When you don't need it anymore, you can terminate it by pressing Ctrl-C, or simply by closing the terminal window. You can run this as a unix service to run permanently.

Your entry proxy will be available by HTTP on <your_public_ip> port 8080.

Accessing TON Sites​

Now suppose that you have a running instance of the RLDP-HTTP Proxy running on your computer and listening on localhost:8080 for inbound TCP connections, as explained above.

A simple test that everything is working properly may be performed using programs such as curl or wget. For example,

curl -x 127.0.0.1:8080 http://just-for-test.ton

attempts to download the main page of (TON) Site just-for-test.ton using the proxy at 127.0.0.1:8080. If the proxy is up and running, you'll see something like


<html>
<head>
<title>TON Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>TON Proxy Works!</h1>
</body>
</html>

You can also access TON Sites by means of their ADNL Addresses by using a fake domain <adnl-addr>.adnl

curl -x 127.0.0.1:8080 http://utoljjye6y4ixazesjofidlkrhyiakiwrmes3m5hthlc6ie2h72gllt.adnl/

currently fetches the same TON Web page.

Alternatively, you can set up localhost:8080 as a HTTP proxy in your browser. For example, if you use Firefox, visit [Setup] -> General -> Network Settings -> Settings -> Configure Proxy Access -> Manual Proxy configuration, and type "127.0.0.1" into the field "HTTP Proxy", and "8080" into the field "Port".

Once you have set up localhost:8080 as the HTTP proxy to be used in your browser, you can simply type the required URI, such as http://just-for-test.ton or http://utoljjye6y4ixazesjofidlkrhyiakiwrmes3m5hthlc6ie2h72gllt.adnl/, in the navigation bar of your browser, and interact with the TON Site in the same way as with the usual Web Sites.

Running TON Site​

tutorial found!

Hey! Don't want to start from beginner-friendly tutorial How to run TON Site?

Most people will need just to access existing TON Sites, not to create new ones. However, if you want to create one, you'll need to run RLDP-HTTP Proxy on your server, along with the usual web server software such as Apache or Nginx.

We suppose that you know already how to set up an ordinary website, and that you have already configured one on your server, are accepting incoming HTTP connections on TCP port <your-server-ip>:80, and have defined the required TON Network domain name (e.g. example.ton) as the main domain name or an alias for your website in the configuration of your web server.

  1. Download rldp-http-proxy from TON Auto Builds.

    Or you can compile the rldp-http-proxy yourself by this instruction.

  2. Download TON global config.

  3. Download generate-random-id from TON Auto Builds.

    Or you can compile the generate-random-id yourself by following these instructions.

  4. Generate a persistent ANDL Address for your server

    mkdir keyring

    utils/generate-random-id -m adnlid

    You will see something like

    45061C1D4EC44A937D0318589E13C73D151D1CEF5D3C0E53AFBCF56A6C2FE2BD vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3

    This is your newly-generated persistent ADNL Address, in hexadecimal and user-friendly form. The corresponding private key is saved into file 45061...2DB in the current directory. Move it into the keyring directory

    mv 45061C1* keyring/

  5. Make sure your webserver accepts HTTP requests with .ton and .adnl domains.

    For example if you use nginx with config server_name example.com;, you need to change it to server_name _; or server_name example.com example.ton vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3.adnl;.

  6. Run the proxy in reverse mode

    rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -a <your-server-ip>:3333 -L '*' -C global.config.json -A <your-adnl-address> -d -l <log-file>

    where <your_public_ip> is your server public IPv4 address and <your_adnl_address> is the ADNL Address generated in the previous step.

If you want your TON Site to run permanently, you'll have to use options -d and -l <log-file>.

Example:

rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -a 777.777.777.777:3333 -L '*' -C global.config.json -A vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3 -d -l tonsite.log

If all works properly, the RLDP-HTTP proxy will accept incoming HTTP queries from the TON Network via RLDP/ADNL running on UDP port 3333 (of course, you can use any other UDP port if you want to) of IPv4 address <your-server-ip> (in particular, if you are using a firewall, don't forget to allow rldp-http-proxy to receive and send UDP packets from this port), and it will forward these HTTP queries addressed to all hosts (if you want to forward only specific hosts, change -L '*' to -L <your hostname>) to TCP port 80 at 127.0.0.1 (i.e. to your ordinary Web server).

You can visit TON Site http://<your-adnl-address>.adnl (http://vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3.adnl in this example) from a browser running on a client machine as explained in the "Accessing TON Sites" Section and check whether your TON Site is actually available to the public.

If you want to, you can register a TON DNS domain, such as 'example.ton', and create a site record for this domain pointing to the persistent ADNL Address of your TON Site. Then the RLDP-HTTP proxies running in client mode would resolve http://example.ton as pointing to your ADNL Address and will access your TON Site.

You can also run a reverse proxy on a separate server and set your webserver as a remote address. In this case use -R '*'@<YOUR_WEB_SERVER_HTTP_IP>:<YOUR_WEB_SERVER_HTTP_PORT> instead of -L '*'.

Example:

rldp-http-proxy/rldp-http-proxy -a 777.777.777.777:3333 -R '*'@333.333.333.333:80 -C global.config.json -A vcqmha5j3ceve35ammfrhqty46rkhi455otydstv66pk2tmf7rl25f3 -d -l tonsite.log

In this case your regular webserver should be available on http://333.333.333.333:80 (this IP will not be exposed to the outside).

Recommendations​

Since anonymity will only be available in TON Proxy 2.0, if you do not want to disclose the IP address of your web server, you can do it in two ways:

  • Run a reverse proxy on a separate server with -R flag as described above.

  • Make a duplicate server with copy of your website and run reverse proxy locally.