Vick's

I was building something real — a Django-based hobby project, coded entirely on my phone using Termux. It was scrappy, resourceful, and full of energy. Every day, I typed out commands on a tiny terminal, running the server with python manage.py runserver, exposing it with Cloudflare Tunnel, and connecting it to a real domain from Namecheap.

From mobile development to live on the web — it felt like a true hacker’s path.

But I wanted more. More privacy, more control, more edge. So I went a step further and set up a Tor hidden service alongside the surface deployment, trying to make my project live on both the clear and dark web.

That’s when things began to fall apart.

🔥 The Collapse

Running Tor inside a proot-distro Ubuntu shell over Termux sounded clever at first — until it wasn’t. Services clashed. Tor tried to write to /etc, Cloudflare Tunnel got confused, and proot couldn’t fully protect critical system paths.

Then it happened.

A single mistimed Ctrl+C while everything was running — and my entire shell collapsed. Suddenly I couldn’t even run ls. The file system was shredded. My Django files, the db.sqlite3 database, everything was gone.

No Git backup. No push to GitHub. Just silence. Digital nothingness.

💡 The Turning Point: From Phone to Pi

Instead of quitting, I chose to rebuild — but smarter this time. I moved the entire project to a Raspberry Pi.

✅ Real Linux system
✅ Full control over files and processes
✅ Can run Tor, Nginx, Django, and tunnels natively
✅ Always-on and energy-efficient
✅ Automated GitHub backups
✅ Accessible via SSH from anywhere

The same project that once lived precariously in a phone terminal now runs reliably on a Raspberry Pi — securely tunneled, backed up to GitHub, and served through Vercel for the frontend.

🧠 What I Learned

• Don’t run serious workloads inside Termux. It’s great for tinkering — not production.

• Tor and tunnels need system-level control — emulated shells can’t guarantee stability.

• Back up everything. Whether it’s git push, tar, or cloud sync — don’t rely on local files alone.

• Use real Linux hardware like a Raspberry Pi or a VPS when things matter.

• Split your architecture wisely:

  • Code on GitHub

  • Frontend on Vercel

  • Backend on Raspberry Pi (or VPS)

  • Domain and DNS via Cloudflare

🚀 From Terminal Crash to Real Infrastructure

What started as a humble mobile hobby project now stands as a fully-deployed, resilient system — spanning both the surface web and the onion network, version-controlled and future-proofed.

I didn’t just recover — I leveled up.

And if you're building something scrappy in a shell right now, here’s my advice:

Keep going — but prepare to grow.