Manual

Pivilion is a decentralizing open source darknet web server project and gallery management software for the creation of autonomous & uncensored digital media art online galleries. It runs on low cost Raspberry Pi hardware and is built on top of Raspbian GNU/Linux with a server and Tor networking built in, utilizing the Tor network to host exhibitions out of the box.

Each Pivilion device receives a Tor onion domain automatically the first time it’s activated. The system provides the user with a CMS for publishing multimedia or websites within a gallery. It’s designed so that the author-curator can use any network (even public networks behind firewalls) to host an online exhibition.

Pivilion is primarily a long-term, open-ended new media art project propagating autonomous modes of art in the darknet, and is continuously including a large number of artists and cultural workers in its creation.

The documentation and the announcement of global #pivilion_dot events are available via the central website, hosted both on clearnet and as a hidden service on the Tor network, while the entire open source system is available via git.

Project website: pivilion.net

Required hardware:

- Raspberry Pi with WiFi
- min 8 GB SD card
- battery or power adapter

Installation on current Raspberry Pi OS

Pivilion supports Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye, Bookworm, and Trixie. Bookworm and newer systems use NetworkManager automatically; Bullseye installations using dhcpcd use the legacy hostapd backend. The repository layout and the original commands are preserved on both backends.

On a fresh Raspberry Pi OS Lite installation:

git clone https://gitlab.com/hacklab01/pivilion.git
cd pivilion
sudo ./install.sh
sudo reboot

The installer defaults to the user that invoked sudo, not to a hard-coded pi account. To customize paths, startup mode, hotspot SSID, or Wi-Fi interface, copy pivilion.conf.example to /boot/firmware/pivilion.conf (or /etc/pivilion.conf) and edit it before installing. The hotspot is intentionally open and passwordless.

Use pikey to save upstream Wi-Fi credentials, then onion and reboot to host through Tor. Use hotspot and reboot to run the local captive gallery at http://10.1.1.1/. HTTPS interception is intentionally not attempted because a local captive portal cannot present valid certificates for arbitrary sites.

If a phone joins but does not open its captive-login window, run pivilion-diagnose on the Pi to verify DHCP/DNS, Apache rewrite handling, nftables, and the common Android, Apple, and Microsoft HTTP probes.