Using Zerops VPN

At Zerops, We really care about your security so we tried our best to provide you the best resources and tools to interact with your project deployed on Zerops securely as everything is inside a private network and nothing is exposed to the internet.

Prerequisites

• zCLI (this will work as a wireguard client)
• Zerops Project with a Service

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Zerops uses WireGuard VPN, but unlike typical consumer VPNs focused on changing your public IP address, our implementation is specifically designed to securely connect you to your project and interact with the services inside it.

Usage

You can interact with the services inside your project or even SSH to your service after you're connected to the project using vpn.

Start VPN

Start a VPN session with:

zcli vpn up

bash

Usage:
  zcli vpn up [projectId] [flags]

Flags:
      --auto-disconnect    If set, zCLI will automatically disconnect from the VPN if it is already connected.
  -h, --help               the vpn up command.
      --projectId string   If you have access to more than one project, you must specify the project ID for which the
                           command is to be executed.

Or you can also connect to a specfic project by passing your project ID which you can get from your zerops dashboard gui and add it into the projectId parameter:

zcli vpn up Evs8Je4NTvKeIkUqoUXp2w

You may need enclose your project name with quotes if it contains contains spaces.

Info

When running zcli vpn up for the first time, you'll be prompted to install the Zerops VPN daemon. Enter y to confirm (you may need to provide your root/administrator password).

Once connected, you’ll have secure access to the project’s private network.

You can reach all services locally using their hostnames. However, environment variables are not available when connected via VPN.

You can only connect to one project at a time. If you’re already connected to another project, that connection will close automatically when you start a new connection by running zcli vpn up and choosing another project.

The VPN daemon keeps the connection open until you manually stop it. If the connection drops, it will automatically try to reconnect.

Stop VPN

Use zcli vpn down command to stop the existing VPN session.

bash

Usage:
  zcli vpn down [flags]

Flags:
  -h, --help   the vpn down command.

How do we provide better security?

We are using WireGuard under the hood for VPN to establish a secure tunnel connection to a private network of a Zerops project. This approach provides a safer connection compared to SSH.

Additionally, you won't need to add any passwords or IP addresses for SSH access. WireGuard is a free, lightweight, open-source software—technically a communication protocol—that utilizes cryptography.

It helps us create a secure tunnel that uses UDP for transmitting traffic. We use public/private key pairs for authorization.

Inside Zerops project runs a Wireguard server and zCLI(Zerops Command Line Interface) works as a Wireguard client which helps you to interact with your zerops project if you're authorized.