Please help me set up this stupid hidden service

I'm trying to set up a hidden service on a remote VPS but it's not going so well. I've done this a dozen times before without any problems so I suspect there's something weird with this particular system.

At first I ran into issues with AppArmor, but I have disabled that. I stopped the service, disabled the service, appended "apparmor=0" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in my grub config, updated grub and rebooted the system. Unless I missed a step, AppArmor should be off and not interfering anymore.

Here's the problem: Tor works fine until I add my HiddenServiceDir and HiddenServicePort options to /etc/tor/torrc. When I do that and restart the service, it refuses to start. It doesn't even bother creating the log file (which it does when the hidden service is commented out). Nothing in dmesg which is where I initially saw AppArmor causing problems. All I have is journalctl:

```

Failed to start tor@default.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP.

```

How the fuck do I debug this? I'm at a loss. Save me tforum.

ls -l HiddenServiceDir

drwx------ 2 debian-tor debian-tor 4096 Apr 24 04:08 my_onion

Ain't that right?

Yes, that's right.

What happens if you run

LOG_LEVEL=debug tor

manually, without systemd?

[warn] Directory /mnt/n/my_onion/ cannot be read: Permission denied

[warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to configure rendezvous options. See logs for details.

Still not working but at least I can see the log now

you just need to check files owner permissions and make it correct and it will work.

I suppose you have problem with ownership of folder where are keys and hostname (onion domain). /var/lib/tor/my-onion

if you use apache web server, apache or better said www-data should be the owner of website/html/php files.... /var/www/html/my-site