Excellent tutorial on how to setup a lightning node using Blockstream’s c-lightning over Tor on a Linux system.

Read the full tutorial here

Quick Summary

1. Generating your Tor .onion address

• Install tor daemon, it can be done on Debian with the following commands:

    $ sudo apt install tor

• Edit the /etc/tor/torrc config file to configure tor to pass traffic to the c-lightning node and generate an .onion address. Add these lines to torrc:

    HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/lightningd-service_v2/
    HiddenServicePort 1234 127.0.0.1:9735

• This will create a tor version 2 .onion address. For a version 3 address use the following:

    HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/lightningd-service_v3/
    HiddenServiceVersion 3
    HiddenServicePort 1234 127.0.0.1:9735

• Version 3 addresses has many advantages over the v2. You can create both and have more peers connect to either one.

• Better crypto (replaced SHA1/DH/RSA1024 with SHA3/ed25519/curve25519)
• Improved directory protocol, leaking much less information to directory servers.
• Improved directory protocol, with smaller surface for targeted attacks.
• Better onion address security against impersonation.
• More extensible introduction/rendezvous protocol.
• A cleaner and more modular codebase.

• You can now enable/restart the tor service:

    sudo systemctl enable tor
    sudo systemctl restart tor

• You caw see the generated tor addressed at /var/lib/tor/lightningd-service_v2/hostname and /var/lib/tor/lightningd-service_v3/hostname

2. Configure c-lightning:

• You can run c-lightning over tor with the following command:

   $ ./lightningd --mainnet --bind-addr=127.0.0.1:9735 --announce-addr=<your v2 .onion> \
   --announce-addr=<your v3 .onion> --proxy=127.0.0.1:9050