RP(1)

🦋 rp(1) — the high-level interface to rosenpass, bestie edition

okay so this is rp(1), a General Commands Manual page, and it's literally the glow-up wrapper that lets you build a whole VPN with WireGuard and Rosenpass without losing your mind 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

rp — high-level interface to rosenpass. that's it, that's the vibe.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

rp [explain] [verbose] genkey ... | pubkey ... | exchange ...
rp [...] genkey PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR
rp [...] pubkey PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR PUBLIC_KEYS_DIR
rp [...] exchange PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR [dev <device>] [listen <ip>:<port>]
   [peer PUBLIC_KEYS_DIR [endpoint <ip>:<port>] [persistent-keepalive
   <interval>] [allowed-ips <ip1>/<cidr1>[,<ip2>/<cidr2>] ...]] ...

like… look at that. iconic. no cap, it's a lot of brackets, but we move 🫶

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

The rp program is the whole reason you're here: it's used to build a VPN with WireGuard and Rosenpass. two technologies, one little command, main character energy fr fr ✨

The optional [explain] and [verbose] options? bestie, those are your besties. use them to obtain further help, or to enable a detailed view on the operations, respectively. like turning the lights on in the group chat 🔥

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🎀 COMMANDS 🎀

• genkey PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR — creates a new directory with appropriate permissions (it's giving responsible), and generates all the necessary private keys required for a peer to participate in a rosenpass connection. your keys, your business 🔐
• pubkey PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR PUBLIC_KEYS_DIR — creates a fresh directory at PUBLIC_KEYS_DIR, and it contains the extracted public keys from the private keys generated by genkey and located inside PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR. basically the shareable version. the one you actually send to people 💌
• exchange PRIVATE_KEYS_DIR [dev <device>] [listen <ip>:<port>] [PEERS] — starts the VPN on interface device, listening on the provided IP and port combination, allowing connections from PEERS. this is the moment. the VPN is vpn-ing 🌈

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⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

The rp utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. so like, zero means slay, anything else means something's up 😭

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🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

okay this is the fun part, get comfy 🧚

In this example, we will assume that the server has an interface bound to 192.168.0.1, that accepts incoming connections on port 9999/UDP for Rosenpass and port 10000/UDP for WireGuard.

To create a VPN connection, start by generating secret keys on both hosts.

rp genkey server.rosenpass-secret
rp genkey client.rosenpass-secret

Extract the public keys:

rp pubkey server.rosenpass-secret server.rosenpass-public
rp pubkey client.rosenpass-secret client.rosenpass-public

Copy the "-public" directories to the other peers and then start the VPN. On the server:

sudo rp exchange server.rosenpass-secret dev rosenpass0 listen 192.168.0.1:9999 \
    peer client.rosenpass-public allowed-ips fe80::/64

On the client:

sudo rp exchange client.rosenpass-secret dev rosenpass 0 \
    peer server.rosenpass-public endpoint 192.168.0.1:9999 allowed-ips fe80::/64

Assign IP addresses:

sudo ip a add fe80::1/64 dev rosenpass0 # Server
sudo ip a add fe80::2/64 dev rosenpass0 # Client

Test the connection by pinging the server on the client machine:

ping fe80::1%rosenpass0 # Client

You can watch how rosenpass replaces the WireGuard PSK with the following:

watch -n 0.2 'wg show all; wg show all preshared-keys'

ngl, that last one is lowkey mesmerizing. just watching the PSK get swapped on loop? obsessed 👀

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

rosenpass(1), wg(1) — go read these too, iykyk 💜

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Rosenpass was created by Karolin Varner, Benjamin Lipp, Wanja Zaeske, Marei Peischl, Stephan Ajuvo, and Lisa Schmidt. absolute legends, all of them 💖

This manual page was written by Emil Engler. thank you for your service 🫶

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💀 BUGS 💀

The bugs are tracked at https://github.com/rosenpass/rosenpass/issues. found one? go tell them, don't suffer in silence bestie 🙈

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aaand that's the page! 🎀 cute little sign-off: this is from the Debian folks, dated $Mdocdate$, and it's RP(1) — go build a VPN, you've got this 💅✨