OpenVPN Installation Script

TL;DR; All the features of the original that also allows passing arguments to make automation easier. The repo.

Recently I have had to work on installing and configuring a few OpenVPN servers. Since I needed to use OpenVPN, not OpenVPN access server, I started looking around the web to find a nice installation script that would make it easier and provide some guidance. After a little searching, I found this Github repo by Nyr called openvpn-install. This script had a lot of nice features and provided a nice guided installation. After a couple more hours, I discovered this fork by Angristan that had a few tweaks that did appear to improve upon the security of the installation. After spending some time testing it out, I decided that it was the method I wanted to use to perform my installations. One major flaw that I found in both of these installation scripts is that neither one had implemented any parameterized arguments.

I decided that I was going to resolve the parameterization issue by forking the script and adding parameters. As anyone that has done Bash programming knows adding parameters isn’t intuitive or dare I say, easy. So, after much Stackoverflow and blog post reading, I stumbled across Argbash. This is really awesome site that allows you to define your arguments and it will generate the parsing and the help for you without any efforts.

After using Argbash, I pushed up my changes to my fork that can be found here. The usage is straight forward, but here is a preview of getting the script and what it prints out. Also, note, that if an argument isn’t provided, the user will be prompted just like in the original script.

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phillipsj/OpenVPN-install/master/openvpn-install.sh
$ chmod +x openvpn-install.sh
$ ./openvpn-install.sh --help

The general script's help msg
Usage: ./openvpn-install.sh [-i|--ip <arg>] [-p|--port <arg>] [-d|--dns <arg>] [-c|--cihper <arg>] [-f|--diffie <arg>] [-r|--rsa <arg>] [-u|--client <arg>] [-k|--key <arg>] [-s|--secret <arg>] [-b|--bucket <arg>] [-t|--bucket-path <arg>] [-n|--(no-)skip-confirmation] [-h|--help]
        -i,--ip: external ip address (no default)
        -p,--port: Port to use (default: '1194')
        -l,--protocol: Protocol to use (default: 'TCP')
        -d,--dns: DNS servers to use (default: '1')
        -c,--cipher: Cipher to use (default: '3')
        -f,--diffie: Diffie-Hellman key you want to use (default: '3')
        -r,--rsa: RSA key you want to use (default: '3')
        -u,--client: Client Name (default: 'client')
        -n,--skip-confirmation,--no-skip-confirmation: Skip confirmation (off by default)
        -h,--help: Prints help

As you can see, I picked a few middle of the road defaults to assist with the automation. That’s all, thanks for reading.

If you enjoy the content, then consider buying me a coffee.