Simple Node.js program to monitor the activity of OpenVPN clients and render a web interface to see a list of connected clients. Must run on the same machine which hosts the OpenVPN server.
To use this program, the OpenVPN Management Interface must be enabled in the server.conf file. On my system (Debian 10) this was located in /etc/openvpn/, but this may differ on other operating systems.
Append management 127.0.0.1 7505 to the server.conf file, e.g. by running:
# Make sure the path to server.conf is correct
echo 'management 127.0.0.1 7505' | sudo tee /etc/openvpn/server.conf -a
Then restart the OpenVPN service:
sudo systemctl restart openvpn@server.service
You can check that the management interface is working by running:
telnet localhost 7505
The output should look something like this:
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
>INFO:OpenVPN Management Interface Version 1 -- type 'help' for more info
For a list of available commands, type help. To quit, type exit.
Note: The Node.JS program is basically just parsing the responses from the OpenVPN Management Interface. It is therefore important that the OpenVPN Management Interface was enabled correctly in the previous step.
Download the latest version of Node.JS (here using nvm):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git curl npm -y
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.0/install.sh | bash
Close and re-open the terminal and type
nvm install node --lts
Make sure the latest version of Node.JS was installed by running
node --version
# Should be at least v13
Clone this repository:
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/ErikLysne/OpenVPN-Activity-Monitor.git
cd OpenVPN-Activity-Monitor
npm i
Run the program:
node --experimental-modules app.mjs
Open a web browser and go to http://<host ip address>:3000 to launch the web interface.