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Tutorials | Mar 29, 2018 | 9 min read

Outline VPN: How to install it on your server (Tutorial)

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An image of the Jigsaw/Outline VPN logo.
Outline VPN is a new open source VPN that promises an incredibly easy-to-install VPN experience—far easier than existing options, like OpenVPN. That's great news, as setting up a virtual private network (VPN) on a personal server has never been particularly easy. In fact, our tutorial on installing OpenVPN is one of our most-read tutorials.... ...but keyservers and a dozen configuration files can flummox even experienced sysadmins. Streisand is much more straightforward to install but forces you to dedicate your entire server to its VPN software—not great for flexibility or getting more value from your existing server. Outline VPN—created by Jigsaw—is trying to do things a little differently.

What's different about Outline VPN?

Via Outline, Jigsaw is trying to make VPNs not only secure, but also incredibly easy to set up—especially for those who don’t happen to be sysadmins. The target demographic for the Outline VPN is journalists and news organizations, but anyone can take advantage of their hard work. Here’s what Jigsaw has to say about their goals:
Journalists need safe access to information to research issues, communicate with sources, and report the news. Outline makes it easy for news organizations to set up a virtual private network (VPN) on their own server. This gives news organizations the power to provide anyone in their organization safer access to the internet and keep their communications private.

An Outline VPN server is incredibly easy to set up

Thanks to 3 simple facts, it's super-easy to install Outline VPN on your server:
  • It uses Docker containers.
  • It uses a single command for installation.
  • It can be installed concurrently with other apps, web servers, and more.
Sadly, the official Outline VPN documentation implies that you have to use a server from one of our competitors (I won’t deign to mention them here), but the truth is that Outline can, and will, run anywhere... So, here’s a tutorial for the rest of us on how to install Outline with Docker:

Prerequisites

  • A VPS running any of our OS options
  • A working Docker installation
  • A non-root, sudo-enabled user
  • A local computer running
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A note about tutorials: We encourage our users to try out tutorials, but they aren't fully supported by our team—we can't always provide support when things go wrong. Be sure to check which OS and version it was tested with before you proceed.

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