Create your own VPN server with WireGuard in Docker

In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily create your own private VPN server with WireGuard running in a Docker container. I will walk you step by step through the installation, configuration, and how to add clients to your VPN server.

You can follow this tutorial with any Ubuntu- or Debian-based Linux distro. Other distros may also work, but it isn’t tested and optimized by the creator of the docker image, we’re using. In my case, I’ve used Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because it already has installed the WireGuard kernel module.

install docker and docker-compose

Before we can create and start containers, we need to install Docker and Docker-compose. If you already have installed docker and docker-compose on your server, you may skip these steps.

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.26.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Create a docker-compose file

Next, we need to create a docker-compose file to easily manage your WireGuard container. To do that, I’m using a docker image and template from the website https://linuxserver.io. The guys from linuxserver.io are ethusiasts and manage docker images for the community.

First, I create a new folder in the /opt directory called /opt/wireguard-server and create a new docker-compose.yaml file in this directory. You should also change the ownership of this folder to your Linux user.

sudo mkdir /opt/wireguard-server
sudo chown christian:christian /opt/wireguard-server
vim /opt/wireguard-server/docker-compose.yaml

In this file, you can use the following template, please refer to the linuxserver/wireguard documentation: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/wireguard

version: "2.1"
services:
  wireguard:
    image: linuxserver/wireguard
    container_name: wireguard
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
      - SYS_MODULE
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - SERVERURL=wireguard.domain.com #optional
      - SERVERPORT=51820 #optional
      - PEERS=1 #optional
      - PEERDNS=auto #optional
      - INTERNAL_SUBNET=10.13.13.0 #optional
    volumes:
      - /opt/wireguard-server/config:/config
      - /lib/modules:/lib/modules
    ports:
      - 51820:51820/udp
    sysctls:
      - net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1
    restart: unless-stopped

Replace the SERVERURL with the public IP address of your WireGuard Server, because your clients will need to connect from outside your local network. You can also set this to auto, the docker container will automatically determine your public IP address and use this in the client’s configuration.

start your WireGuard Server

Now you can start your WireGuard container with the following command and clients should be able to connect.

cd /opt/wireguard-server
docker-compose up -d

Distribute the config files to clients

You could also use the linuxserver/wireguard docker image for your clients. But I think it’s more practical for a client to install WireGuard directly on the host OS. If you want to know how to do that, you can also refer to my article about WireGuard installation and configuration on Linux.

When you have started the WireGuard container, it should automatically create all configuration files in your /opt/wireguard-server/config folder. All you need to do is to copy the corresponding peer1/peer1.conf file to your client and use that as your wg0.conf, for instance. If you want to connect mobile phones you can also just scan the peer1.png QR code, to print the QR code to the console, simply use the following command

docker exec -it wireguard /app/show-peer <peer-number>

Add additional clients

If you want to add additional clients, you simply can increase the PEERS parameter in the docker-compose.yaml file. After changing this value you need to restart your docker container with the –force-recreate parameter.

docker-compose up -d --force-recreate

Learn more about docker and docker-compose