Streisand VPN: How To Install And Configure (Tutorial)

We've written about VPNs before, but the Streisand VPN, with a supposedly easy installation process, has caught our eye.

The results are clear: Streisand VPN is one of the easiest VPS+VPN installations we've found. It's much easier than OpenVPN, and only the Outline VPN is easier to install, depending on your particular needs.

In the following tutorial, you'll learn how to set up the Streisand VPN on a new Ubuntu 16.04 VPS in a matter of minutes (plus a handful more for Ansible).

Prerequisites to install Streisand VPN

On your VPS:

• A brand-new Ubuntu 16.04 installation—this means either just purchased and provisioned, or reinstalled using the dashboard.

On your local machine:

• A BSD, Linux, or OS X system (no Windows support)
• A working SSH key at ;~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• Git
• The pip package management system for Python—see here for installation instructions
• Ansible—see our Ansible tutorial or the official documentation for more details

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Step 1. Copying your SSH key to the bare server

We've covered SSH keys at length in other tutorials, but we'll quickly walk through the steps here again.

In order for Streisand VPN to communicate with your server through Ansible, it needs to use public key authentication rather than passwords. We'll create a private key on our local machine, and then copy the public key to the VPS to enable this connection.

If you don't have an SSH key yet

Simply create a new SSH key using the ssh-keygen command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

When asked where to save the key, just hit Enter—we want the default location in this case.

Whether or not you enter a passphrase is entirely up to you—they can be blank—but we recommend a strong, secure passphrase to improve the integrity of your server if your private key was ever exposed.

Now that you have an SSH key,