This guide provides the minimal first-step instructions required to connect to any WireGuard based VPN server. If you also want to set up your own WireGuard server, you may start by reading the official quickstart guide.

I’ll be using a free-to-use, WireGuard based VPN service, SecurityKiss. They provide a limited free plan and affordable paid plans. No email registration is required to use it. The same steps should apply to other WireGuard based VPN servers as well.

Start by downloading a VPN client configuration file from securitykiss.com/download

The downloaded file would contain the following details.

[Interface]
Address=<interface-ip>
PrivateKey=<client-private-key>
DNS=8.8.8.8

[Peer]
PublicKey=<server-public-key>
Endpoint=<server-public-ip>:7668
AllowedIPs=0.0.0.0/0,::/0
PersistentKeepalive=25

SecurityKiss would generate all the placeholder values including the private key. So you don’t have to make any modifications to the downloaded config file to be able to use it.

Then install the WireGuard client. wireguard meta package include command line tools required to connect to WireGuard VPN servers.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install wireguard resolvconf

resolvconf is internally used by wireguard to set the interface’s DNS servers specified in the configuration file.

Copy or move the config file to /etc/wireguard/

sudo cp US_New_York_1.conf /etc/wireguard/

Then to connect to the VPN tunnel:

sudo systemctl enable wg-quick@US_New_York_1

Make sure to replace US_New_York_1 with the name of your configuration file.

This will brings up a new network interface with properties supplied in the given configuration file. The name of the network interface would be as same as the name of the configuration file.

systemctl enable is used to make wg-quick.service start at boot.

To find the details about the newly added network interface, run:

ip address show
ip address show US_New_York_1