Setting Up Your Own VPN Server Quickly and Easily: Installing Pritunl

Setting Up Your Own VPN Server Quickly and Easily: Installing Pritunl

VPN servers based on OpenVPN are probably the most popular solution. OpenVPN clients are available on all modern operating systems and mobile platforms, as well as many SMB and SOHO routers. For the server side, VDS is usually chosen for private and work applications. There are many software options available; previously we discussed OpenVPN AS and Streisand. Now, let’s focus on Pritunl.

Pritunl is a multifunctional VPN server management platform that allows you to easily manage user accounts. It supports scalability, two-factor authentication for enhanced security, and provides useful statistics.

Installation Steps

Let’s install Pritunl on an SSD VDS. You can choose any desired location and order a virtual server with CentOS 7 as the operating system. Activation takes just a few minutes. Launch your SSH client, log into the VDS, and proceed with the following steps:

This time we will use Docker. Utilizing Docker makes it easier to manage multiple applications on your VDS without worrying about package conflicts. It also speeds up and simplifies the installation process.

Once logged into your virtual server, execute these commands to disable the built-in firewall, install Docker, and start it:

systemctl disable firewalld; systemctl stop firewalld; wget -O - https://get.docker.com | bash
systemctl enable docker; systemctl start docker;
docker run \
--name=pritunl \
--detach \
--privileged \
--network=host \
--restart=always \
jippi/pritunl

The installation takes only a couple of minutes. After that, open a browser, enter the URL of your VDS, and start using your own VPN server! Remember, the default username and password are pritunl/pritunl; be sure to change them to something secure.

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