Introduction

This is the GNU/Linux desktop client and Python API for eduVPN. The Desktop client only works on Linux, but most parts of the API are usable on other platforms also. For the API Python 2.7, 3.4+ and pypy are supported.

Installation

It is recommended to use a package to install the eduVPN client, but you can also install using pip from py or directly from github. We distribute RPM packages for Fedora, and Deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu.

The eduVPN client has been tested with:

  • Debian 9 (Stretch), Debian 10 (Buster)
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS
  • CentOS 7 & 8
  • Fedora 30 & 31

Note

If you target is not supported the client might still, potentially work with limited functionality. You need to have Network Manager and OpenVPN 2.4.0+ installed.

Debian and Ubuntu

You can install the latest release on Debian or Ubuntu using the eduVPN packaging repository by running these commands as root or using sudo:

$ apt install apt-transport-https curl
$ curl -L https://repo.eduvpn.org/debian/eduvpn.key | apt-key add -
$ echo "deb https://repo.eduvpn.org/debian/ stretch main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/eduvpn.list
$ apt update
$ apt install eduvpn-client

This has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) and Debian 9 (stretch). Unfortunately, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) is not supported. Ubuntu Xenial and older are bundled with an outdated and unsupported OpenVPN.

Note

For Debian Stretch you need to enable the backports repository and manually update network manager. network-manager-openvpn >= 1.2.10 is required for tls-crypt support. To enable the backports repository add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main contrib non-free

And then update network-manager:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -t stretch-backports install network-manager-openvpn-gnome

Fedora

You can install the latest release of the eduVPN client on Fedora by running these commands as root or using sudo:

$ dnf install dnf-plugins-core
$ dnf copr enable gijzelaerr/eduvpn-client
$ dnf install eduvpn-client

More information is available at fedora copr.

Centos

You can install the latest release of the eduVPN client on Centos 7 or 8 by running these commands as root or using sudo:

$ yum install yum-plugin-copr
$ yum copr enable gijzelaerr/eduvpn-client
$ yum install eduvpn-client

More information is available at fedora copr.

Note

Currently CentOS 7 ships with an outdated NetworkManager so some features might not work properly.

Pip

You can install the client API from pypi:

$ pip install eduvpn-client

Or if you want to try out the bleading edge development version:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/eduvpn/python-eduvpn-client.git

You can install the dependencies for the user interface:

$ pip install -e ".[client]"

Note

the project depends on the python-gi package, which for now doesn’t properly install in a virtualenv. If you do install python-eduvpn-client in a virtualenv it is recommended you create the virtualenv using the --system-site-packages flag and install the python-gi package using your operating system package manager. Read more about this on the pygobject website.

If you use eduVPN this way you need to make sure all non-Python dependies are installed. For Debian or Ubuntu:

$ apt install gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7 libdbus-1-dev libnotify4 python3-dateutil \
    python3-dbus python3-nacl python3-requests-oauthlib python3-gi network-manager-openvpn \
    python3-pip git

For fedora:

$ dnf install -y gtk3 libnotify python3-dateutil python3-networkmanager python3-pydbus \
    python3-pynacl python3-requests-oauthlib python3-gobject python3-pip \
    python3-configparser python3-future git NetworkManager-openvpn NetworkManager-openvpn-gnome

Issues

If you experience any issues you could and should report them at our issue tracker. Please don’t forget to mention your OS, method of installation, eduVPN client version and instructions on how to reproduce the problem. If you have a problem enabling your VPN connection please also examine the journalctl -u NetworkManager logs.

Source code

Development of this project takes place on github. You can find the source code and all releases there.

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! If you experience any problems let us know in the bug tracker. We accept patches in the form of github pull requests. Please make sure your code works with python 2 and python3, and is pep8 compatible. Also make sure the test suit actually passes all tests.