DEV Community

Building Your Own VPN for Free

William Baptist on August 21, 2023

VPN companies have advertisements everywhere, there’s a reason they sponsor most tech YouTubers (they’ve even tried it with me) but you don’t need ...

Read full post

Thomas Bnt • Aug 22 '23

Hello good post !

Don't hesitate to put colors on your codeblock like this example for have to have a better understanding of your code 😎

console.log('Hello world!');

William Baptist • Aug 22 '23

It's Linux commands not code so there aren't many colours but I've made the changes, thanks for the heads-up.

Thomas Bnt • Aug 22 '23

Maybe with bash language can work!

William Baptist • Aug 22 '23

Yes, it is bash

Andrea Pavoni • Aug 24 '23 • Edited

Not to sound harsh in my comment, but I feel the need to state some important points on why it’s not free:

vps/cloud servers have a cost
and bandwidth costs even more
maintenance has a cost in terms of time

Other notes:

it’s “private” in terms of access, but it doesn’t prevent tracking or any kind of anonymization for your data

William Baptist • Aug 24 '23

For sure, I just want to show alternatives to paid options in cybersecurity so it can become more accessible. You will need to do more than this to have your own VPN, but just buying a VPN isn't the only option.

Andrea Pavoni • Aug 24 '23

Sorry to insist, but this isn't a reliable alternative because:

it gives a false sense of security, especially to people who haven't enough knowledge/experience about cybersecurity basic concepts, other than how cloud services work. For example:
it might generate high billings if someone thinks bandwidth is coming for free
user might get banned from a cloud platform for abusing/misusing their services: imagine getting banned from AWS, GCP or Azure, where you already have some services running for your business
the server where is running the VPN software isn't updated properly/regularly, resulting in potential data breaches

You will need to do more than this to have your own VPN, but just buying a VPN isn't the only option

I'm sure you meant something more coherent, but these two sentences are contradicting each other:

you need a lot more work and knowledge to build a reliable VPN
buying a VPN is almost the only option IF you don't know what you're doing

I admire the purpose of your article, but I also think that certain knowledge should be spread with more depth. Security can't be improvised.

William Baptist • Aug 24 '23 • Edited

I don't think you can get banned from AWS etc. by making and testing your own VPN. My intention is not to use this in an enterprise setting and more of a small project at home using your own hardware.
For sure buying is the only option if you don't know what you are doing but if you can learn then it isn't. If you're testing something out as a base for something better then you can improvise through testing until you know it works.

Andrea Pavoni • Aug 24 '23

I don't think you can get banned from AWS etc.

You can be banned. Every platform has policies about how you are going to use their services, bandwidth is included.

My intention is not to use this in an enterprise setting

What you said can't be confirmed by a title that says: Building Your Own VPN for Free and a body where there isn't any kind of disclaimer about this other than claiming that you can build a VPN for free without the need to buy a professional one.

and more of a small project at home using your own hardware

this somewhat contradicts the main pillars of a VPN, which is basically a way to create a tunnel connection between hosts and/or networks which aren't physically on the same spot (hence the name).

I hope you're aware that the contents of this post are almost the same of what you can find on the main OpenVPN website (or blogs around the web) since 2004. It's ok to repost, but in 2023 the expectations about content quality for old stuff should be a must.

phtn458 • Oct 5 '23

Can you write code instead?

spO0q • Aug 25 '23

I appreciated your post. Straight to the point!

However, you should be careful with your statement, IMHO. Building and maintaining your own VPN services can be risky.

You don't get better security or privacy if you don't know what your doing.

Because your tutorial seems to target beginners and has tags like cybersecurity, I would recommend some disclaimers or warnings about the potential dangers, especially if you plan to make sensitive operations.

It's easy to misconfigure your tunnel and expose your data.

Ben Sinclair • Aug 30 '23

I think the biggest warning this post needs is that if you're intending to use your personal VPN for anything other than trivial traffic, and you're using a cloud VPS, you're going to run up huge bills for bandwidth.

Instead of being "free", this will cost you roughly the same per month for the VPS as one of those YouTube-spamming VPNs cost, and many times that in additional bandwidth.

It's fine for setting up between, say, your home and a friend's home though. In fact, it's a perfect fit for that job.

semo • Aug 26 '23

Needs more in-depth explanation why and where you scraped the configuration setup. Also I don't think that Cloud Services will let you not pay for using bandwidth you suddenly request. Can be very expensive 🫰
Sources???

trebleCode • Aug 24 '23

Any thoughts on scripting it?

forcegetnecmettin • Aug 24 '23

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/angristan/openvpn-install/master/openvpn-install.sh
chmod +x openvpn-install.sh
./openvpn-install.sh

you can check for openvpn-install

Ben Sinclair • Aug 30 '23

I think it's a bad idea to run code from the Internet like that. It's far too easy for a malicious poster to add a helpful comment and get people to run bad code on their machines.