Volemad - a quick systray interface to Mullvad’s WireGuard servers, written in Common Lisp

Note 1

Migrated from https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/volemad

Note 2

The newer versions of the official Mullvad client seem to show up properly in the systray and connect quickly, so there is probably no longer a need for this application. (Though at some point I might try to re-write it to use the Mullvad daemon directly rather than having a separate daemon to talk to Wireguard.)

Additional (2022-May-2022):

On some OSes which didn’t have native official Mullvad packages, I’ve been using NixOS’s Mullvad package. Unfortunately, on Guix System, while using NixOS’s Mullvad package works more-or-less, it has problems with DNS lookup (which I don’t quite understand). Volemad works on Guix though, so that’s my current solution on my Guix machine. Requires installing the following Guix packages:

• sbcl
• sbcl-cl+ssl
• yad
• curl
• wireguard-tools

You’ll also want most likely to run Mullvad’s Wireguard installer which additionally requires:

• jq
• openresolv

The daemon should be run as root/with sudo. The binaries will be installed in /usr/local/bin, which is not, by default, in Guix’s $PATH.

Description

‘VOLEMAD is an application for quickly interacting with Mullvad’s WireGuard servers, written in Common Lisp.

There currently are three ‘versions’ of Volemad:

• volemad-cli - a commandline interface
• volemad / volemad-yad - an implementation using a GTK3 front-end (via yad)
• volemad-argos - a plugin for Argos (for GNOME Shell extensions), BitBar-‘compatible’, depends on volemad-cli [Nb.: Unfortunately Argos appears to be currently broken in the latest GNOME Shell]

All three ‘versions’ depend on volemad-daemon, a simple daemon written in portable shell script, intended to be run as a system daemon.

Backstory: Volemad was written after increasing frustration with the official Mullvad Electron app which began not showing up in the systray on my system. A happy side effect: this app is much faster than the Electron app, and has a different feature set than the official app.

Features

• connect, disconnect, and change servers extremely quickly (much faster than with the official app)
• get a quick report on your apparent current location
• automatically reconnects to a different server in the same selected region (city, country, or global) if server is reported as blacklisted
• systray icon (in the graphical versions) indicates whether currently connected to a Mullvad server or not

Installation instructions

How to install volemad-cli

• have a Mullvad account
• install sbcl
• libnotify (/ libnotify-bin on Debian/Ubuntu) is required if you want pop-up notifications for location
• install WireGuard and other requirements and run Mullvad’s configuration script as detailed at https://mullvad.net/en/help/wireguard-and-mullvad-vpn/
• cd into volemad-cli
• run make
• then sudo make install
• then enable the appropriate system daemon (see below)

How to install volemad(-yad)

• have a Mullvad account
• install sbcl
• install WireGuard and other requirements and run Mullvad’s configuration script as detailed at https://mullvad.net/en/help/wireguard-and-mullvad-vpn/
• install yad and libnotify (/ libnotify-bin on Debian/Ubuntu)
• cd into volemad-yad
• run make
• then run sudo make install
• then enable the system daemon (see below)
• launch the Volemad frontend by running volemad as your ordinary user

How to install volemad-argos

• have a Mullvad account
• install volemad-cli as detailed above
• install the Argos GNOME extension (again, Nb.: Argos seems to be broken on the lastest GNOME Shell)
• cd into volemad-argos
• run make
• then run sudo make install
• then cp /usr/local/share/volemad-argos/volemad-argos ~/.config/argos/

Enable the Volemad daemon [required for all operation/versions]

• if your init/daemon-manager is runit (e.g. on Void Linux):
  • run sudo set-up-daemon-runit.sh
• if your init/daemon-manager is systemd (e.g. on Debian/Ubuntu/Arch/etc.):
  • run sudo set-up-daemon-systemd.sh
• if your init/daemon-manger is something else:
  • tell me the appropriate way of setting up a root daemon for your init/daemon-manager
  • and, as a stop-gap, run sudo volemad-daemon from a terminal or have root launch on it on boot (e.g. in /etc/rc.local)

How to use it

How to interact with volemad(-yad)

• right-click on systray icon for a drop-down menu allowing interaction with WireGuard connection, then left-click on:
  • “DISCONNECT” to disconnect
  • “QUIT” to quit
  • “RANDOM server” to connect to a random Mullvad WireGuard server
  • COUNTRY name to connect to a random server in $COUNTRY
  • CITY name to connect to random server in $CITY
• left-click on systray icon to (if you have libnotify) get a pop-up notification with your current apparent IP location information (via ipapi)
• hover over the systray icon for information about the current Mullvad server (if connected)
• icon reports status:
  • dark bluish icon indicates connection to Mullvad
  • red icon indicates no connection to Mullvad

How to interact with the commandline volemad-cli

• flags:
  • -d = disconnect VPN
  • -r = connect to a random Mullvad relays
  • -l = show a pop-up notification with apparent location information
  • -b = force a fresh rebuild of Volemad’s database of Mullvad relays
  • -p = connect to a relay in a specified country
  • -s = connect to a relay in a specified city (requires -p as well)
• the first four flags are mutually exclusive and take no argument
• -p and -s both require arguments (and -s requires -p)
• examples:
  • disconnect from VPN:

volemad -d

• connect to a relay in Finland:

volemad -p 'Finland'

• connect to a relay in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA:

volemad -p 'USA' -s 'Salt Lake City, UT'

How to interact with volemad-argos

• similar to interaction with volemad(-yad); but, Nb.: I have not been able to properly test due to current GNOME Shell breakage of the Argos extension.