7

Is this possible? I want to have one Shortcut which works like a On/Off button for a VPN (similar to a wireless on/off Button on many laptops). To achieve this, I would probably need a script involving the network manager?

Reason: I have to connect and disconnect my VPN a lot. Every of these connects or disconnects takes three clicks, which adds up, plus my mouse is very insensitive (even in the most sensitive setting)

I have LM 18.1 Mate, with 4.8 Kernel.

Patrick Christoph Lechner
  • 191

2 Answers2

12

I just found the solution, very straight forward.

Simply creating two shortcuts, with the commands below:

for VPN ON: nmcli con up servername

for VPN OFF: nmcli con down servername

enter image description here

Patrick Christoph Lechner
  • 191
  • 6
    Thanks for the tip. I turned my single shortcut into a toggle with a conditional command: bash -c 'if [[ -n $(nmcli con show connection-name | grep "VPN connected") ]]; then nmcli con down connection-name; else nmcli con up connection-name; fi'. – Robert Taylor May 31 '17 at 07:20
3

I took this a bit further and thought I'd share it here.

I created a .sh script and an associated .desktop file so I can easily invoke this from Gnome.

The shell script I've placed in ~/.local/bin/vpn-toggle.sh

#!/usr/bin/env sh


CONNECTION_NAME=Home


if [[ -n $(nmcli connection show $CONNECTION_NAME | grep "VPN connected") ]]; then
nmcli connection down $CONNECTION_NAME;
else
nmcli connection up $CONNECTION_NAME;
fi

Remember to change the CONNECTION_NAME to the name of your connection.

The .desktop file I've placed in ~/.local/share/applications/vpn-toggle.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
#Icon=/path/to/icon/icon.svg
Name=VPN Toggle
Exec=/home/tons/.local/bin/vpn-toggle.sh

You need to fix the Exec path to match your system. I couldn't get it to work with ~ and didn't care to investigate further.

user672009
  • 135
  • You could make it better by making CONNECTION_NAME="$1" and wrapping around $CONNECTION_NAME with double quotations. The first one makes the script generalized, so that a user can give the VPN name as the argument, and second one makes spaces inside VPN name acceptable. – MAChitgarha Feb 05 '22 at 12:19
  • Thanks for this! Total nitpicking but the first line of the script can be slightly optimised as if [ -n "$(nmcli -g GENERAL.STATE connection show $CONNECTION_NAME | grep activated)" ]; then. I've also setup a GNOME keyboard shortcut to the script (<Super>+V works nicely), so a single key press allows me to toggle my VPN on and off. This doesn't even require the .desktop file; you simply reference the script in $HOME on the shortcut's command. – sxc731 Jan 15 '25 at 17:12