Introduction

This vagrantfile spins up an Ubuntu 14.04 x86 droplet in DigitalOcean's cloud. It then configures the droplet using ssh provisioners to serve as an OpenVPN server. Finally it creates an ovpn client config file for easy importing into an OpenVPN client.

Prerequisites

1. vagrant-digitalocean

   By default this vagrantfile uses DigitalOcean as the provider of choice. As such it requires the vagrant-digitalocean plugin. It can be installed by:

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-digitalocean

2. ~/.do credentials

   A DigitalOcean personal access token is required. By default the vagrantfile looks for a one line file with the access token at ~/.do. Either create the ~/.do file or modify the TOKEN constant variable in the Vagrantfile.

3. [OPTIONAL] vagrant-rsync-back

   This plugin is used to sync the client ovpn and cert files back to the host from the droplet.

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-rsync-back

Configuration

Modify the vagrantfile as needed for user specific cases. The most common changes are to the provider.region and provider.size variables. Note that some constants are exposed at the top of the Vagrantfile to assist in configuration. These options include:

• CLIENTS :: Number of client ovpn config files to create
• FORCE :: If set to true all client ovpn config files will be destroyed and recreated.
• REGION :: DigitalOcean region in which to create the server instance. A list of regions and their current status can be found at https://status.digitalocean.com/.
• SIZE :: Size of the server instance. This setting directly correlates with the memory size at https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/. WARNING: Changing this value will have a direct effect on the fees paid to DigitalOcean.
• SSH_KEY :: Path to the local ssh key
• TOKEN :: The path to the file containing the DigitalOcean access token. Can also be the access token itself. See prerequisites above.

Basic Usage

vagrant up
vagrant rsync-back #optional

1. The droplet is created and configured with the vagrant up command.
2. Once the vagrant provisioning is complete, client certs and configuration files can be found in the /vagrant/client_certs directory ON THE DROPLET. They can be retrieved by either remote copying the file back to the host or via the following step...
3. If the vagrant-rsync-back plugin was installed, the /vagrant/client_certs directory can be synced back to the host by running the vagrant rsync-back command on the local host. The configs and certs can then be found in the ./client_certs directory on the local host.

Using with an OpenVPN client

Once the client.ovpn file has been acquired by either of the mechanisms described above it can be imported into most OpenVPN client softwares. A short, incomplete list follows:

Windows

• OpenVPN

Mac

• Tunnelblick

Troubleshooting

• When doing a vagrant up occasionally the command will hang. Though there could be several reasons for this the most likely is that a vagrant ssh key-pair already exists in your DigitalOcean account. You can either delete the offending key from your DigitalOcean account as described here or you can edit the provider.ssh_key_name variable from the Vagrantfile.
• After a vagrant destroy be sure to delete the contents of the ./client_certs directory before running vagrant up again.