Configuring WireGuard with wg-portal

Instrument Panel

Article from ADMIN 87/2025

By Matthias Wübbeling

The wg-portal project helps you set up, manage, and scale a WireGuard VPN environment.

WireGuard, the VPN server incorporated into the Linux kernel, has been available for some time and is becoming increasingly popular, replacing large VPN environments by traditional manufacturers on corporate networks. The main focus of WireGuard's development was to reduce the number of optional connection, encryption, and authentication parameters to the required minimum and to achieve a very small codebase as a result. What WireGuard lacks to support professional use is a management interface that handles the major share of the integration work for admins and clients.

The developers of the open source WireGuard Portal (wg-portal) [1] have set out to address exactly this problem. They are developing a web portal that supports admins, starting with creating the key material, through endpoint address management and routing configuration, to automatic access scheduling. Users can manage access independently through the self-service portal. In this article, I look at wg-portal installation and configuration and reveal the drawbacks involved in daily VPN use.

Docker Image

You need a WireGuard installation in place to try out the Docker image, although the installation does not have to be fully configured. The image provided by the developers [2] is useful for trying out wg-portal without too much overhead. Because you can modify the configuration by setting environment variables and because you need to integrate some volumes into the container, you will want to use the Docker compose function. The side effect is that it also makes it easier for you to try out different configurations. To get started, run the file shown in Listing 1.

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