Private Internet Access VPN - ArchWiki

# Private Internet Access VPN

PIA is a subscription based service provided from the PIA. From the PIA's How It Works page:

  PRIVATE INTERNET ACCESS provides state of the art, multi-layered security with advanced privacy protection using VPN tunneling.

## Requirements

PIA supports nearly any operating system and solution any user would need. This guide automatically sets up the configurations for PIA which works for most Arch Linux users.

Note: Arch Linux users may setup PIA manually by reading information on PIA Client Support page.

## Installation

Install the private-internet-access-vpnAUR package.

The package downloads the OPENVPN CONFIGURATION FILES (DEFAULT) and stores them in `/etc/openvpn`. However, it updates the file names to better support using them on the command line.

Configuration for the package is stored in `/etc/private-internet-access`

## Usage

Note: As of version 2.0, the command `pia` is provided by python-pia.
Note: As of version 1.5, the command as changed from `pia-auto-login.py` to `pia`. Also, command line options have changed.

### Enabling auto-login

Enabling auto-login allows a user to connect to the VPN service without having type any passwords on the command line (needed when using networkmanager). To set this up, you must do the following:

- Create `/etc/private-internet-access/login.conf`
- Add your username and password in the file. Make sure LINE 1 is your username and LINE 2 is your password. Do not add any other text to the file or it will not work (this is a limitation of OpenVPN):

    /etc/private-internet-access/login.conf

    USERNAME
    PASSWORD

- Change permissions of the file to 0600 and owner to root:root:

    # chmod 0600 /etc/private-internet-access/login.conf
    # chown root:root /etc/private-internet-access/login.conf

This secures the access to the file from non-root users. Read more on File permissions and attributes. It is required when activating auto-login.

- Run `pia -a` as root.
  - If you have networkmanager installed, it will created the configuration files for networkmanager. Make sure to restart networkmanager to see them.
  - If you have connman installed, it will create the configuration files for connman. Start `connman-vpn.service` if not running already. It will auto load the profiles.

### Manually Connecting to VPN

Run `openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/{config_file_name}` as root. {config_file_name} will be listed in the /etc/openvpn directory.

### Automatically connect to VPN

- For connman:

1. enable the `connman-vpn.service`.
2. Run `pia -a` as root.

Note: These are unsupported configurations.

- For openvpn you can look here: OpenVPN#systemd service configuration.

## See also

- OpenVPN
- NetworkManager
- connman
- python-pia GitHub
- PIA Client Support

Category:

- Virtual Private Network