PIAsync aims to be a simple and lightweight tool that automaticaly manages configuration information in the NetworkManager data domain for the VPN servers operated by Private Internet Access.
In addition, PIAsync is respectful of your user and system configuration. It will never:
- Execute any external processes
- Write anything on the filesystem itself
- Require superuser privileges
- Require native packages to be installed
All interactions with NetworkManager are performed using the latter's D-Bus API, the way it should be.
- Install PIAsync (you'll need Python 3 and
pip
):$ pip3 install piasync
- Run it:
$ piasync -h usage: piasync [-h] [-n] [-a] [-v] username cert Maintains Network Manager connections for the Private Internet Access VPN servers positional arguments: username Username to use for the VPN connections cert Path to the PIA root CA optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -n, --dry-run Do not manipulate the NetworkManager configuration -a, --all-users Make the connections available to all users -v, --verbose Output debug information
Because PIA's list of servers is quite large and setting up connections manually for each one would be tedious. There are automated solutions available, but tools that write config files without my informed consent upset me very much, so I wanted a tool that would not do that.
- PIASync uses jeepney for interacting with NetworkManager over D-Bus.
- The requests library is used to download fresh configuration information from the PIA website.
- Lastly, countrynames is used to match the names given by PIA to its servers to a country code for the purpose of injecting a cute Emoji flag in the user-visible connection name.