The proton-vpn-core-api acts as a facade to the other Proton VPN components, exposing a uniform API to the available Proton VPN services.

Development

Even though our CI pipelines always test and build releases using Linux distribution packages, you can use pip to set up your development environment.

Proton package registry

If you didn't do it yet, to be able to pip install Proton VPN components you'll need to set up our internal Python package registry. You can do so running the command below, after replacing {GITLAB_TOKEN} with your personal access token with the scope set to api.

pip config set global.index-url https://__token__:{GITLAB_TOKEN}@gitlab.protontech.ch/api/v4/groups/777/-/packages/pypi/simple

In the index URL above, 777 is the id of the current root GitLab group, the one containing the repositories of all our Proton VPN components.

Known issues

This component depends on the PyGObject python package.

To be able to pip install PyGObject, please check the required distribution packages in the official documentation.

sudo apt install pkg-config libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev

Virtual environment

You can create the virtual environment and install the rest of dependencies as follows:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Rust submodule

Build the Rust binary:

cargo build --features "python,core,local_agent,protun"

Create a symlink to the rust binary:

ln -sf ../../target/debug/libproton_vpn_platform.so proton/vpn/platform.abi3.so

Then install the package in editable mode:

pip install -e .

After each cargo build the symlink automatically points to the updated .so — no reinstall or re-copy needed.

Tests

You can run the python tests with:

pytest

proton-vpn-platform

proton-vpn-platform is the Rust backend for ProtonVPN's Linux client. It implements a NetworkManager VPN plugin for WireGuard-based connections (protun), a local agent communication layer, and server scoring — exposing functionality to higher-level ProtonVPN tooling via both native Rust and Python (PyO3) interfaces.

Core

Building

cargo build --features 'core,python'

Testing

cargo test --features 'core,python'

Local Agent

Building

cargo build --features 'local_agent'

Testing

cargo test --features 'local_agent'

Protun

Building

cargo build --bin nm-protun-service --bin nm-protun-auth-dialog --lib --features 'protun, nm_protun_auth_dialog, python'

Testing

cargo test --features 'protun, nm_protun_auth_dialog, python'

Installing

Register the plugin with NetworkManager:

sudo bash -c 'cat resources/nm-protun.name | envsubst > /usr/lib/NetworkManager/VPN/nm-protun.name'

Grant the plugin rights to the D-Bus namespace:

sudo cp resources/nm-protun-service.conf /usr/share/dbus-1/system.d/

Creating a connection

Use the cli nm command to generate and apply the nmcli command from a WireGuard config file:

cargo run --bin nm-protun-service --features protun -- cli nm --read-config /path/to/wireguard.conf | bash
nmcli connection up proton0

Debugging

Use this command to see stdout/stderr of the plugin.

sudo journalctl -u NetworkManager.service -f -o cat

Packet capture

Use the cli protun command to send commands to a running protun service. For example, to start and stop a packet capture:

cargo run --bin nm-protun-service --features protun -- cli protun pcap-start --file-path /tmp/capture.pcap
cargo run --bin nm-protun-service --features protun -- cli protun pcap-stop