PiVPN Static Status Page

Monitor your PiVPN connections with a simple static HTML page

Overview

This script allows you to easily monitor your PiVPN connections by visiting a static web page, which is easier than SSHing into a machine to view clients.
NOTE: This is NOT a GUI for PiVPN. This is purely a static HTML page for viewing connected clients. You will NOT be able to create, modify, disable, or delete any VPN profiles. That still must be done through the host machine.

Prerequisites

• PiVPN - see https://www.pivpn.io/ for more info
• Web Server of your choice - There are many options avaliable, i.e. NGINX, Apache, Lighttpd, php built in server. Anything is fine.
• (Optional) figlet - For a nice banner at the top of your page. can be installed with: sudo apt install figlet

Installing

1. Move to your directory of choice, clone the repo, and cd into it or download the generate file.

git clone https://github.com/SlimJim716/PiVPN-Static-Status

cd PiVPN-Static-Status

2. Open generate with an editor of your choice, like nano, or vim.

nano generate

3. Edit the CONFIG AREA section to match your installation. Save the file and exit when done

#-------------------------------------------------------
#                   CONFIG AREA
#-------------------------------------------------------
wg_enabled=true #set to true if you have Wireguard enabled in PiVPN, set to false otherwise
ovpn_enabled=true #set to true if you have OpenVPN enabled in PiVPN, set to false otherwise
banner_name="PiVPN Status" #(OPTIONAL) change the name of the top ascii banner. Requires figlet.
#-------------------------------------------------------
#-------------------------------------------------------

4. Make generate executable

chmod 744 generate

5. Open crontab

crontab -e

6. Add the following line to cron so the script will update periodically. This will refresh the HTML every minute - change the timing as desired. Be sure to change the placeholder paths below.

* * * * * /path/to/script/generate > /path/to/output/index.html

6a. Optional. Since this is most likely deployed on a Raspberry Pi, instead of writing to disk, we can write to a tmpfs partition instead to minimize disk usage. We can change the line above to this.

* * * * * mkdir -p /dev/shm/pivpnss && /path/to/script/generate > /dev/shm/pivpnss/index.html

7. Serve the page with your favorite web server. This step is up to you. Below is a basic config example for NGINX using a subdomain for the page.

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name pivpnstatus.example.com;
        location / {
                root /path/to/PiVPN-Static-Status;
        }
        
}

You could also use PHP's built in web server while inside the PiVPN-Static-Status directory.

php -S <YOURIP>:8080 index.html