Portl

Bash script to start Wireguard in its own Linux network namespace and then run arbitrary commands within that namespace. This "portals" individual process traffic through the Wireguard interface without affecting traffic for any other process. Requires root/sudo.

Portl is useful if you want select programs to (be forced to) use Wireguard as a VPN without affecting traffic from the rest of your system or having to calculate complicated AllowedIP ranges for some excluded IPs (like your local subnet). It's also a good solution for when you want a specific tool to be able to access both local and on-VPN network resources at different times, but have the same (or overlapping) subnet CIDRs on the local and remote ends.

Requires GNU sed, grep, cut, and tr to be installed. If you get errors about unsupported flags in these commands it's probably because you have a BSD (POSIX) version installed.

Quick Start

Start a Wireguard server on a machine you want to use a relay. If you're not familiar with this process, this or this should get you started.

Generate a basic Wireguard configuration file compatible with wg-quick that will connect to your client machine to the Wireguard server. For this example, save it as tunnel.conf.

• Set AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0 in this configuration file

Then run the following commands on your client:

./portl.sh config ./tunnel.conf
./portl.sh up
./portl.sh show

• If the Wireguard connection was successful, the show command output should include a line like latest handshake: X seconds ago that indicates a connection was established with a successful handshake.

Now you now can tunnel traffic for arbitrary programs through this connection by running ./portl.sh exec <any command>

• ./portl.sh run <any command> is equivalent
• You can also use ./portl.sh <any command> so long as the first word in the command is not the same as one of the other portl commands.

Usage

Usage: portl.sh [ config FILE | up | down | show | exec CMD | run CMD | help ]

COMMANDS
        config FILE
                Set FILE as the wireguard configuration file to use when creating or deleting the portl namespace

        up
                Create the portl namespace (must run 'config' first)

        down
                Delete the configured portl namespace

        show
                Shortcut to run 'wg show' within the portl namespace

        exec CMD...
                Run any command within the portl namesapce

        run CMD...
                Alias for exec

        help
                Display this help message


Each command can also be run by specifying only its first letter, such as 's' instead of 'show'.

If none of the above commands are provided as the first argument, 'exec' is assumed. This means you can use 'portl.sh CMD...' instead of 'portl.sh exec CMD...'

Note that you cannot chain COMMANDs together with pipes inside the namespace; anything after the first pipe will run outside the namespace due to the way shells handle them. If you need to do this, start by running 'portl.sh bash' or similar, at which point everything that runs in the new shell will be inside the portl.sh namespace.


Example
-------
portl.sh config ./tunnel.conf
portl.sh up
portl.sh show
portl.sh exec ping -c 4 10.0.0.1
portl.sh curl 10.0.0.1:8080/info.txt
portl.sh down

Commands:

• config path/to/config/file: specify a Wireguard configuration file to use (caveats below).
• up: brings up a namespaced Wireguard interface using the config file specified previously.
• show: shortcut to run wg show within the configured namespace.
• down: removes the Wireguard interface and namespace created by up.
• exec [command]: run an arbitrary command within the namespace created by up.
• run [command]: same as exec.

Note that the namespace and interface names are defined at the top of the script and can be changed. By default the namespace is portl and the interface is portl0. The rest of this documentation will describe the script's behavior assuming those values remain unchanged.

Tip

If you want to setup multiple portl tunnels to different systems just make a copy of the script file (with a different name, such as portl2.sh) and change the NAMESPACE and INTERFACE values near the top of the file to something unique.

Tip

Rename the script to portl and put it in a folder in your PATH to make it easy to use portl no matter what your current working directory is.

The script requires root privileges to function. The first thing it does is check if it's running as root, and if not it automatically attempts to elevate to root using sudo. This may prompt the user for credentials.

config FILE

The specified config file should be one that is compatible with wg (see the CONFIGURATION FILE FORMAT section here), plus the (required) Address and (optional) DNS options supported by wg-quick (detailed here). ANY OTHER wg-quick-SPECIFIC OPTIONS USED BESIDES Address OR DNS WILL BE SILENTLY IGNORED. Comments (#) are fine and will be respected/preserved, but avoid using a #~ combination anywhere because that is used as a special marker for parsing the supported wg-quick commands.

At a minimum, the config file should contain the following:

[Interface]
PrivateKey = [base64 private key]
Address = [address/subnet to be used by the client]

[Peer]
PublicKey = [server's public key]
AllowedIPs = [IP range(s) for traffic that should be sent over wireguard]
Endpoint = [server IP or FQDN]:[port] #default port is 51820

• You may also swap out the Peer's Endpoint for an Interface ListenPort if you want to act more like a server and have the peer initiate connections to this machine.

The specified config file will be copied to /etc/wireguard/portl0.conf. Address and DNS lines (not supported by wg) will be commented out but parsed later by the up command to configure the interface. The config file will persist after the interface is removed (via the down command or otherwise) so you should only need to run config once unless configuration changes are needed.

up

Uses the config file at /etc/wireguard/portl0.conf (created via the config command) to create a Wireguard interface named portl0 located in the portl network namespace.

If the original config file contained DNS=IP options (also allowing multiple comma-separated IPs), those will be parsed and applied as nameserver [IP] values to a resolve.conf file specific to the portl namespace. This is done by writing the values to /etc/netns/portl/resolve.conf, which Linux will make available inside the namespace at the standard /etc/resolve.conf location without affecting that file outside the namespace. Like the config file in /etc/wireguard/, this namespaced resolve.conf file will be persistent and remain in use until modified manually or by the config command. If /etc/netns/portl/resolve.conf does not exist (either because it is deleted or DNS was never specified in a config file) then the namespace will use the same /etc/resolve.conf file as the main OS.

show

Shortcut to run wg show within the namespace.

exec CMD...

Runs the specified command as the current user, even when sudo is used to run the script with root privileges. To run a command as root just specify sudo as part of the command. For example, portl.sh exec sudo iptables -L.

Pretty much any command that you would normally run in your shell can be used and should work as expected. You can even use something like bash as the target command to open a shell within the namespace, then return to the parent shell with exit.

Important

Using a pipe (or other command-terminating shell characters) will NOT allow the next command to run inside the namespace. For example, if you run portl.sh exec echo "google.com" | xargs ping, the ping command will NOT run inside the namespace, it will use your normal host namespace.

Tip

If you need to use something like pipes, run portl.sh exec bash to start a new shell inside the namespace, and then everything you run from that shell will also run inside that namespace.

run CMD...

Same as exec.

down

Brings down the namespaced Wireguard interface, then deletes the portl namespace (and all network interfaces in it). Any configuration options specified with the config command will be preserved (no need to run config again after down), but any namespace-specific changes that were made inside the namespace (e.g. iptables rules) will be lost.

Docker Version (dportl.sh)

This script is the same as the original portl.sh, except it moves the wireguard interface into an existing docker container's namespace instead of creating a new portl namespace. As part of this process it also deletes all existing network interfaces inside the container, except for lo (loopback).

• Deleting other interfaces ensures container traffic is forced through the Wireguard interface, but will probably break things if the container is meant to communicate with any other containers or do any other special local networking activity. This is intended mainly for use with containers that provide access to standalone tools/programs that target network resources, for example nmap.

Usage is exactly the same as the portl.sh script described above, except the up command takes a single argument: the truncated 12-character CONTAINER ID of the target container, as displayed by docker ps. E.g. dportl.sh up e90b8831a4b8.