Private Internet Access OpenVPN
An Alpine Linux container running OpenVPN via Private Internet Access
Based on ColinHebert/pia-openvpn
Improvements
- Updated to new PIA configs with strong encryption (AES-256-CBC data encryption, RSA-4096 SSL handshake, SHA256 message authentication)
- Updated README
What is Private Internet Access
Private Internet Access VPN Service encrypts your connection and provides you with an anonymous IP to protect your privacy.
How to use this image
This image provides the configuration files for each region supported by PIA.
The goal is to start this container first, and then run other containers within the PIA VPN via --net=container:pia
.
Starting the client
docker run --cap-add=NET_ADMIN --device=/dev/net/tun --name=pia -d \
--restart=always
--dns 209.222.18.222 --dns 209.222.18.218 \
-e 'REGION=<region>' \
-e 'USERNAME=<pia_username>' \
-e 'PASSWORD=<pia_password>' \
act28/pia-openvpn
Substitute the environment variables for REGION
, USERNAME
, and PASSWORD
as indicated.
NOTE: REGION
is optional. The default region is set to US East
. REGION
should match the supported PIA .opvn
region config. See the PIA Support page for details.
Due to the nature of the VPN client, this container must be started with some additional privileges, --cap-add=NET_ADMIN
and --device=/dev/net/tun
make sure that the tunnel can be created from within the container.
Starting the container in privileged mode would also achieve this, but keeping the privileges to the minimum required is preferable.
Creating a container that uses PIA VPN
docker run --rm --net=container:pia appropriate/curl -s ifconfig.co
The IP address returned after this execution should be different from the IP address you would get without specifying --net=container:pia
.
Advanced usage
Additional arguments for the openvpn client
Every parameter provided to the docker run
command is directly passed as an argument to the openvpn executable.
This will run the openvpn client with the --pull
option:
docker run ... --name=pia \
act28/pia-openvpn \
--pull
Avoid passing credentials via environment variables
By default this image relies on the variables USERNAME
and PASSWORD
to be set in order to successfully connect to the PIA VPN.
You can bind mount a local file containing the credentials, like so:
docker run ... --name=pia \
-e 'REGION=US East' \
-v '</path/to/auth.conf>:auth.conf' \
act28/pia-openvpn \
--auth-user-pass auth.conf
Connection between containers behind PIA
Any container started with --net=container:...
will share the same network stack as the PIA container, therefore they will have the same local IP address.
Prior to Docker 1.9 --link=pia:mycontainer
was the recommended way to connect to a specific container.
Since Docker 1.9, it is recommended to use a non default network allowing containers to address each other by name.
Creating a network
docker network create vpn
This creates a network called vpn
in which containers can address each other by name; the /etc/hosts
is updated automatically for each container added to the network.
Start the PIA container in the vpn
docker run ... --net=vpn --name=pia act28/pia-openvpn
In vpn
there is now a resolvable name pia
that points to that newly created container.
Create a container behind the PIA VPN
This step is the same as the previous one:
# Create a HTTP service that listens on port 80
docker run ... --net=container:pia --name=--name=myservice myservice
This container is not addressable by name in vpn
, but given that the network stack used by myservice
is the same as the pia
container, they have the same IP address and the service running in this container will be accessible at http://pia:80
.
Create a container to access the service
docker run --rm --net=vpn appropriate/curl -s http://pia/
The container is started within the same network as pia
but is not behind the VPN.
It can access services started behind the VPN container such as the HTTP service provided in the myservice
example.