Digitalocean-vpn is a tool written in bash that makes it easy to create a digitalocean droplet running Openvpn. Client config can be easily exported and used in a tool like Tunnelblick.
Digitalocean-vpn makes it possible to run the instance only when needed. Once you have it running, you can sleep and then wake it. While sleeping, droplet doesn't exist - only its snapshot does. Snapshot storage is currently free (written on November, 2015)!
Under the hood, docker and kylemanna/docker-openvpn (https://github.com/kylemanna/docker-openvpn) are being used.
- A machine running OS X or Linux (currently only tested on OS X)
- Digitalocean account and a generated API key for this application
- SSH keypair for connecting to the instance (in current version, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub is automatically used)
Digitalocean-vpn relies heavily on digitalocean's API which uses REST to communicate. Since json is hard to parse just with bash, a single dependency is needed.
OS X
brew install jq
Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get install jq
First you'll need a config file holding the API key for digitalocean.
./digitalocean-vpn
On first run, this will create a config in ~/.digitalocean-vpn. Open it and add your digitalocean API key.
./digitalocean-vpn create
Once the droplet is created, you will be able to extract the config to be used in Tunnelblick ...
$ ./digitalocean-vpn config > ~/Desktop/digitalocean-vpn.ovpn
If you have Tunnelblick installed, you can just double-click the config and it will automatically configure itself.
Put the droplet to sleep when you don't need it. Droplet will be deleted but snapshotted.
$ ./digitalocean-vpn sleep
Droplet can be started from the snapshot without the need to reconfigure tunnelblick with a new config.
$ ./digitalocean-vpn wake
Check if the droplet is running and the state of its snapshot.
$ ./digitalocean-vpn status
Get rid of both droplet and snapshot if either exists.
$ ./digitalocean-vpn destroy
If digitalocean-vpn fails when creating the droplet for the first time, your best bet is to just run ./digitalocean-vpn destroy and then retry the create.
If it fails repeatedly, you have an option to run in debug mode. You'll be able to see all commands currently being executed.
To run in debug mode
$ ./digitalocean-vpn create --debug
Currently, everything about the droplet is hardcoded. The smallest available instance is used in region nyc3. I'm going to change this soon, allowing it to be configured from ~/.digitalocean-vpn