How to Host MyEtherWallet , an exercise for the paranoid!
Recently (well not really recently) there has been a lot of fake MEW (MyEtherWallet) sites popping up. They are made in such a way that they will send the attacker your private key and your ether will be gone. Many have fallen for it and if you do use the website I would like to remind you that the real website is https://www.myetherwallet.com/.
Well if you are a little paranoid about your crypto investments like me why not host your own? The code is open source after all. We will use our favourite low powered ARM device to host the website but this can be done on any PC/Mac/Linux/BSD machine.
when i do something like this I prefer to ssh into my raspberry pi, so lets get to it! I hope you know your raspberry pi internal IP address (looks like 192.168.x.xx) , mine is 192.168.0.23 but it changes. To find it go to the raspberry pi terminal and type
ifconfig
take note of the address next to "inet" in your interface, mine is in wlan0 because I am using a wireless dongle. It will be in eth0 if you are connected through ethernet.
ssh [email protected]
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2
Well you have a web-server. Go into your browser on any device on the home network and type in your internal IP address. It will show you the default index.html for debian/apache2 saying everything is ok.
On your PC that you are using to ssh, visit https://github.com/kvhnuke/etherwallet and go to "Download latest release". You want etherwallet-v3.xx.x.x.zip. As of writing this article latest version of MEW is 3.10.4.3. Get the link for the zip file and copy it into your putty/terminal.
So
sudo wget https://github.com/kvhnuke/etherwallet/releases/download/v3.x.x.x/etherwallet-v3.x.x.x.zip /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html
sudo unzip etherwallet-v3.x.x.x.zip
And that is about it, if you want to host multiple websites on your PI then keep it a seperate folder and access it by typing 192.168.x.x/etherwallet-v3.x.x.x. You should get MyEtherWallet! Use it how you would use the real website.
That's it. Leave it running somewhere and never worry about it again.