ProtonVPN from Command Line

I use Linux for my primary OS and have ProtonVPN unlimited plan. I’d much prefer to connect/disconnect from terminal instead of Graphics UI but cannot find a way to do so.

Has anyone done this before or is this even supported by Proton VPN?

Yes, proton uses Wireguard/Openvpn so you can use any VPN client you like. I use Gluetun on my server to tunnel some of my docker containers traffic

It’s very easy, you just use “protonvpn-cli --help”.

For example “sudo protonvpn-cli c --p2p” will connect to the fastest P2P supported server.

To disconnect you do “sudo protonvpn-cli d”.

You could also download the wireguard (or openvpn configs) from your proton dashboard and use “sudo wg-quick up /path/to/your/config”.

You can also put your wireguard configs in to “/etc/wireguard/” then you won’t have to specify the complete path.

they had a way, protoncli-vpn. worked better then their GUI app

but they removed the instructions from the website … meaning they will not support it anymore

using OpenVPN or Wireguard: it must much less convenient, you cant browse the servers, cant enable Netshield, cant choose -p2p, -f , fetc …

if u are using Linux is easier to do the config via network manager , u can add as many servers as u want and WireGuard works like a charm. ( at least in Ubuntu)

You could create a WireGuard profile and then turn that tunnel on and off with WireGuard command line.

I wish they still supported the CLI. It hasn’t been updated since Sept of 2022

I’m not even sure they support the command line anymore. I know they did on Linux. Couldn’t say about Windows.
If you do run Linux you could always do that with systemd.

There is an official cli client for Protonvpn on Linux

They used to but currently don’t for the current version based on a chat I had with a support agent a few months back but they should be enabling it again at some point if I’m not mistaken

This, that’s what I do too

i just learned what gluetun was because my wireguard docker container stopped working. works like a charm

Hi, the instructions for protonvpn-cli strangely disappeared (I checked last week).

Apparently they are not supporting it. to focus on a “app” that will support only 3 distro !!!

You can still do almost all of that stuff by creating the wireguard config on your protonvpn dashboard. It’s much less convenient.

Do you have instructions I can follow?

Yeah, development has been dead for a long time and it is officially unsupported. The previous CLI client works for some still and not for others but will probably be incompatible at some point. There is no current CLI app. Therefore, as others have pointed out, config files are the only way to go to do this.

The last update was Sept of 2022. It’s a shame they stopped supporting it. Way easier and faster than the GUI

Except I cannot get it to initialize

It has been deprecated.

Been dead for years.