Manage OpenVPN connections within a terminal

This guide shows how to manage your OpenVPN connections in a terminal. You will need root privileges and a .ovpn file, a config file for your OpenVPN connection. A separate username and password are optional. See optional section below.

Optional: Setup auth-user-pass

• Open or create /etc/openvpn/vpn-credentials.txt if necessary:

 sudo nano /etc/openvpn/vpn-credentials.txt

• And add two lines (replace strings with your username and password provided by your VPN provider)

 YOUR_VPN_USERNAME
 YOUR_VPN_PASSWORD

• and save it.

• Open your .ovpn file and edit the line that begins with auth-user-pass like this:

 auth-user-pass /etc/openvpn/vpn-credentials.txt

• and save it.

Setup and start OpenVPN as a service (and enable it on boot)

This part shows how to setup a service for your OpenVPN configuration and how to connect to your OpenVPN service to start on boot.

• Copy your .ovpn file to /etc/openvpn/client/ like this:

 sudo mv your_vpn.ovpn /etc/openvpn/client/your_vpn.conf

Note: Use .conf instead of .ovpn!

• Start the service by running:

 sudo systemctl start openvpn-client@your_vpn.service

• Or run the following command to auto start the service on boot:

 sudo systemctl enable openvpn-client@your_vpn.service

It is possible to manage multiple OpenVPN configurations this way.

To stop the service run:

 sudo systemctl stop openvpn-client@your_vpn.service

And to disable the service on boot run:

 sudo systemctl disable openvpn-client@your_vpn.service