BTCPay Docker Users Have to Opt Into Tor Now, or Their Onion Address Goes Dark
BTCPay Server 2.4.5 no longer bundles Tor inside its standard Docker deployment, so admins must manually select it at their next setup or update to keep onion access. Existing Tor data survives, but it won't reactivate on its own.
If you run BTCPay Server through Docker and you care about your.onion address, you've got homework to do before your next update. Tor isn't bundled anymore. Version 2.4.5, announced Oct. 5, pulls it out of the automatically included components.
So you've to opt in. Manually. Check the Tor box yourself at your next setup or update, or your onion service doesn't come back.
Here's the nasty part. Your existing Tor data isn't going anywhere. Keys, hidden service config, all of it sits right there on disk. Nothing looks broken. Nothing warns you. The service just quietly stops being reachable from outside the clearnet.
Small mercy, I guess.
Preservation isn't activation. The container won't spin Tor back up on its own anymore, and that gap between "data intact" and "service running" is exactly where operators get burned.
Why does this matter? Because BTCPay's entire pitch is self-hosted payments with no middleman. Tor is a huge piece of that promise. It lets a merchant accept Bitcoin without broadcasting their server's IP to anyone who's looking. Run a shop in a jurisdiction that doesn't love crypto and that's not a nice-to-have. That's the thing keeping the doors open.
So why did BTCPay make it optional? Maintenance load. Bundling Tor into every Docker deployment means every operator carries a service plenty of them never switch on. Defensible call. Shipping it as a silent default-off is less so.
The market's verdict: this is a config flag, not a crisis. But config flags are precisely what breaks at 2 a.m. when nobody's reading release notes.
How many self-hosted merchants actually open the changelog before hitting update? Not enough of them.
And just like that, a whole tier of small payment processors could go dark without a single error message to explain it.
Watch your admin panel when 2.4.5 lands, then confirm your onion address still resolves. If it doesn't, go back into setup and tick the Tor box. That's the whole fix. Forgetting it's the whole problem.
