setup-wireguard-vpn

BASH script for easy set up of WireGuard VPN Server and Clients

How to setup a WireGuard server on Linux VM and connect clients to it?

Note

A blog post on "Host Your Own VPN Server" @ https://itzmeanjan.in/pages/host-your-own-vpn_server.html, guides you through using this BASH script.

• Get yourself a $5/month VPS on AWS Lightsail or DigitalOcean.
• SSH into the machine, clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/itzmeanjan/setup-wireguard-vpn

• Execute BASH script on the machine. It should setup a WireGuard VPN server on your VPS.

pushd setup-wireguard-vpn
sudo ./setup_wireguard_server.sh

• Check the status of WireGuard VPN server running with following command.

sudo wg

• Go to network configuration page of VPS console and open port 51820. The WireGuard VPN server is expecting peer connection on that port.
• Executing WireGuard server setup script should generate another script setup_wireguard_client.sh. Let's execute that for setting up our first WireGuard client.

sudo ./setup_wireguard_client.sh

• It should produce a WireGuard peer configuration file peer2.conf. You can import this configuration file in your WireGuard client application to connect to the VPN server, setting up a secure tunnel.
• To check if tunneling is working, lookup your public IP address @ https://ipinfo.io/ip.

curl -s https://ipinfo.io | jq

• Also check if your DNS lookups are leaking @ https://www.dnsleaktest.com/. We want all the traffic to flow through WireGuard secure tunnel and exit into public Internet, from our VPN server.
• For setting up another WireGuard peer, SSH back into VPS, running WireGuard server, open WireGuard client configuration script setup_wireguard_client.sh. Find a BASH variable named PEER_ID, increment its value to 3. Save the script and re-execute it. It should produce another WireGuard peer configuration file peer3.conf. You can import this peer configuration file in another WireGuard client app.
• Simply put, for every new WireGuard client you setup, after the first client, you have to increment the PEER_ID by 1, to assign correct IP addresses to the peers. If you don't do that, tunneling won't work as expected.
• If you restart VPS, running WireGuard server, you have to reload the IPv4+IPv6 packet forwarding configuration, from /etc/sysctl.conf.

sudo sysctl -p

Tip

Prefer to watch the walk through with some background music? Play ./setup_wg_with_bgm.mp4 with your local media player.

Note

This script is an implementation of the steps described in DigitalOcean blog post on "How To Set Up WireGuard on Ubuntu 20.04" @ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04. This script makes the setup process much easier.