Below are several methods available for installing Pritunl.

SELinux Support

Pritunl includes full SELinux polices which cover both the main pritunl process and the isolated pritunl-web web server process. Running Pritunl with a Linux distribution that supports SELinux will significantly improve security. It is recommend to only use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux or CentOS for Pritunl servers. The first log message shown when the Pritunl server is started will indicate the SELinux context. It should look similar to the log message below, if it is none or unconfined the SELinux policy is not functioning.

[pritunl0][2018-12-16 07:45:03,406][INFO] Starting server
  selinux_context = "system_u:system_r:pritunl_t:s0"

Enterprise Clusters

If you intend on creating a Pritunl cluster with multiple hosts all the hosts will need to connect to the same MongoDB database. For cluster configurations it is best to have a dedicated server that is not running Pritunl for the MongoDB database. Single host configurations can run MongoDB with Pritunl on the same server.

Recommended Instance Types

For MongoDB servers with high memory are best (t3.medium, t3.large) are best. For Pritunl nodes high CPU with good single-threaded performance are best (c5.large). For large deployments several small nodes with fewer connections per node is better then fewer larger nodes with more connections per node. For the best performance it is recommended to spend $0.50-$1.00 per concurrent connection each month on server costs. More information on AWS recommendations can be found in the Scaling documentation.

Oracle Cloud Install

To install Pritunl on Oracle Cloud click Create Instance and use the default Oracle Linux image. Then add SSH keys and create the instance.

After creating the instance SSH to the server with the username opc and run the commands below to install Pritunl and MongoDB.

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/mongodb-org-4.2.repo << EOF
[mongodb-org-4.2]
name=MongoDB Repository
baseurl=https://repo.mongodb.org/yum/redhat/7/mongodb-org/4.2/x86_64/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.2.asc
EOF

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/pritunl.repo << EOF
[pritunl]
name=Pritunl Repository
baseurl=https://repo.pritunl.com/stable/yum/oraclelinux/7/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
EOF

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install oracle-epel-release-el7
sudo yum-config-manager --enable ol7_developer_epel
gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 7568D9BB55FF9E5287D586017AE645C0CF8E292A
gpg --armor --export 7568D9BB55FF9E5287D586017AE645C0CF8E292A > key.tmp; sudo rpm --import key.tmp; rm -f key.tmp
sudo yum -y install pritunl mongodb-org
sudo systemctl enable mongod pritunl
sudo systemctl start mongod pritunl

AWS Install

Amazon Linux does not support SELinux and should not be used with Pritunl. Pritunl includes full SELinux policies and an isolated web server process that significantly improve security. Only the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (includes software fee), Oracle Linux and CentOS support SELinux on AWS.

To install Pritunl on AWS open the create instance interface and search for the Oracle Linux owner ID 131827586825 then select the Community AMIs tab. Select the latest Oracle Linux AMI currently OL7.9-x86_64-HVM-2020-12-07. This will use the free official Oracle Linux 7 image with SELinux support.

After creating the EC2 instance SSH to the server with the username ec2-user and run the commands below to install Pritunl and MongoDB.

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/mongodb-org-4.2.repo << EOF
[mongodb-org-4.2]
name=MongoDB Repository
baseurl=https://repo.mongodb.org/yum/redhat/7/mongodb-org/4.2/x86_64/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.2.asc
EOF

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/pritunl.repo << EOF
[pritunl]
name=Pritunl Repository
baseurl=https://repo.pritunl.com/stable/yum/oraclelinux/7/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
EOF

sudo yum -y install oracle-epel-release-el7
sudo yum-config-manager --enable ol7_developer_epel
gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 7568D9BB55FF9E5287D586017AE645C0CF8E292A
gpg --armor --export 7568D9BB55FF9E5287D586017AE645C0CF8E292A > key.tmp; sudo rpm --import key.tmp; rm -f key.tmp
sudo yum -y remove iptables-services
sudo yum -y install pritunl mongodb-org
sudo systemctl enable mongod pritunl
sudo systemctl start mongod pritunl

Automatic Updates

Automatic updates should always be enabled to ensure Linux security updates are always applied. The Pritunl service will not restart when updating and no downtime will occur from updates. Updates to Pritunl will require manually running sudo systemctl restart pritunl.

sudo yum -y install yum-cron
sudo sed -i 's/^update_cmd =.*/update_cmd = default/g' /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf
sudo sed -i 's/^download_updates =.*/download_updates = yes/g' /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf
sudo sed -i 's/^apply_updates =.*/apply_updates = yes/g' /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf
sudo systemctl enable yum-cron
sudo systemctl start yum-cron

When running on Oracle Cloud live kernel patches with Ksplice are included at no additional cost. These updates will not impact system availability and can be applied automatically by running the command below.

sudo sed -i 's/^autoinstall =.*/autoinstall = yes/g' /etc/uptrack/uptrack.conf

Linux Repositories

Pritunl is packaged for several Linux distributions. All available distributions can be found on the Repositories page.

Configuration

Continue to Configuration