Vantah — Unofficial AdGuard VPN GUI for Linux

An unofficial adguardvpn-cli front-end with a window and a system tray icon.

Vantah is a desktop GUI client for Linux (a window plus a system-tray icon) that acts as a convenient front-end for the official adguardvpn-cli command-line tool. Vantah does not implement a VPN itself — it merely runs adguardvpn-cli as an external process, parses its output, and shows the state in a graphical interface.

Naming and legal notice. Vantah is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with AdGuard, and is not developed, sponsored, or endorsed by them; it is not an AdGuard product.

Vantah does not include, bundle, or distribute adguardvpn-cli or any other AdGuard software. You install adguardvpn-cli yourself; its use is governed by AdGuard's own license and terms, and a valid AdGuard VPN account/subscription is required.

"AdGuard", "AdGuard VPN", and related marks are trademarks of their respective owners. They are used here purely nominatively — to indicate compatibility with adguardvpn-cli — and imply neither affiliation nor endorsement by the trademark owners. The name "Vantah" deliberately does not contain the word "AdGuard".

Screenshots

Buttons, toggles and other accents follow your desktop's system accent color (SystemAccentColor), so the UI matches the rest of your system — change the accent in your OS settings and Vantah follows. The galleries below use different accents as examples: green in dark theme, blue in light theme.

Dark theme (green accent)

Status	Locations

Site exclusions	Account

Settings (TUN)	Settings (SOCKS5)

Light theme (blue accent)

Status	Locations

Site exclusions	Account

Settings (TUN)	Settings (SOCKS5)

Requirements

• The adguardvpn-cli tool installed and available on your PATH.

• A valid AdGuard VPN account/subscription. You can sign in directly from the Vantah interface (device-code flow via your browser) or beforehand in a terminal:

  adguardvpn-cli login

Configuration and trust model

Vantah reads an optional INI file at ~/.config/vantah/vantah.conf (you create it yourself; without it the defaults apply):

# Which binary to run as the CLI: a name looked up in PATH or an absolute path.
adguard_cmd = adguardvpn-cli

# Optional command used to force-terminate a CLI process; the PID is appended as
# the last argument. Without this key Vantah signals the process itself via kill(2).
# The template is split on spaces — quoting and paths with spaces are not supported.
kill_cmd = pkexec kill

The same two values can be supplied through the VANTAH_ADGUARD_CMD and VANTAH_KILL_CMD environment variables; if a key is set in both places, the config file wins.

Both values are executed as given — Vantah does not validate, restrict, or sandbox them, and the usual kill_cmd runs through pkexec, that is with elevated privileges. The config file is therefore a trust boundary: anyone able to write to it can make Vantah run an arbitrary command on your behalf. Keep ~/.config/vantah owned by your user and not writable by anyone else — Vantah creates that directory with 0700 permissions (and tightens an existing one) when it writes its own files there.

Features

• Connection. Connect / disconnect, "fastest location", IP protocol choice (IPv4 / IPv6). Clear progress (Connecting… → Connected).
• Locations. List with ping, search, and favorites.
• Status and traffic. Live speed and volume counters, connection history, and a live log tail right in the UI.
• Site exclusions. General / selective modes; add, remove, import, and export the domain list.
• adguardvpn-cli settings. TUN/SOCKS mode, SOCKS port/host/username/password, DNS upstream, protocol, tunnel routing mode, system DNS, post-quantum cryptography, notifications, telemetry and crash reporting, and more.
• Account. Sign in directly from the UI (device-code flow via the browser), license details, sign out.
• Automation. Autostart on login and auto-connect (fastest or last-used location).
• Convenience. System tray (window and tray share one state), UI language switching, CLI update checks, log export, and viewing/terminating CLI processes.

Interface languages

Vantah speaks Russian, English, German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Simplified Chinese; the language is picked in Settings and applies immediately.

Only the Russian and English strings are written by the authors. Every other language is a draft that has not been reviewed by a native speaker — if something reads wrong, an issue or a pull request against src/Vantah.App/Localization/Strings.<code>.resx is very welcome.

Download

Ready-made builds for Linux x86-64 are published on the releases page. No .NET runtime is required — everything is bundled inside.

AppImage — download, make it executable, run:

chmod +x Vantah-*-x86_64.AppImage
./Vantah-*-x86_64.AppImage

tar.gz — unpack and run the vantah binary:

tar -xzf vantah-*-linux-x64.tar.gz
./vantah-*-linux-x64/vantah

.deb (Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives) — install with your package manager; the application-menu entry with an icon appears right after installation:

sudo apt install ./vantah_*.deb

.rpm (Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, and derivatives) — same, via dnf:

sudo dnf install ./vantah-*.rpm

Both packages install the binary to /usr/lib/vantah (with a /usr/bin/vantah symlink) and register the menu entry and icons automatically. They do not pull in adguardvpn-cli (it is not in distro repositories) — install it yourself, see Requirements.

Install from a repository (with automatic updates)

The same packages are built in the openSUSE Build Service, so Vantah is updated by your usual dnf upgrade / zypper up / apt upgrade instead of downloading a file every time. Available for x86-64.

Fedora 43 / 44:

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:bolikcraft/Fedora_$(rpm -E %fedora)/home:bolikcraft.repo
sudo dnf install vantah

openSUSE Tumbleweed (for Leap 16.0 replace openSUSE_Tumbleweed with openSUSE_Leap_16.0):

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:bolikcraft/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:bolikcraft.repo
sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys refresh
sudo zypper install vantah

Debian 13 (for Ubuntu use xUbuntu_24.04 or xUbuntu_26.04 instead of Debian_13):

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/bolikcraft/Debian_13/ /' \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:bolikcraft.list
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:bolikcraft/Debian_13/Release.key \
  | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/home_bolikcraft.gpg > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt install vantah

Arch Linux — the package lives in the AUR as vantah-bin:

yay -S vantah-bin

Every asset ships with a .sha256 file next to it; verify the download with:

sha256sum -c Vantah-*-x86_64.AppImage.sha256

To get an application-menu entry with an icon, build from source and run packaging/install.sh.

Building and running for development

Requires the .NET 10 SDK.

dotnet build
dotnet run --project src/Vantah.App

A plain dotnet build / dotnet run produces a framework-dependent build (fast, not tied to a specific OS runtime).

Building a single self-contained file

A self-contained, single-file binary for Linux is built with one command:

dotnet publish src/Vantah.App -c Release -r linux-x64

The result is a single executable (the .NET runtime and native libraries are embedded), located here:

src/Vantah.App/bin/Release/net10.0/linux-x64/publish/Vantah.App

The binary is around 100 MB (self-contained, no trimming: Avalonia and reflection-based XAML cannot be trimmed safely). The single-file / self-contained flags are enabled automatically when an -r <RID> is provided; without a RID the build stays a regular framework-dependent one, so day-to-day development is not slowed down.

Installing into the application menu

To make Vantah appear in the menu (GNOME, KDE, any other DE) with an icon and launch on click:

packaging/install.sh

The script publishes the self-contained binary, places it in ~/.local/lib/vantah with a ~/.local/bin/vantah symlink, installs icons into ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor and vantah.desktop into ~/.local/share/applications, then refreshes the menu and icon caches. Root is not required. For a system-wide install use PREFIX=/usr/local packaging/install.sh (as root); to uninstall, run packaging/install.sh --uninstall.

Tech stack

• C# / .NET 10 (net10.0).
• Avalonia 12 + FluentAvalonia (theme).
• CommunityToolkit.Mvvm (MVVM).
• xUnit — tests for the core (Vantah.Core) and for the UI (Vantah.App, headless Avalonia).

The project is Linux-only. AdGuard already ships official VPN GUI clients for Windows and macOS, so there is no point duplicating them.

Roadmap

• IP-address and region leak detection — verifying that traffic actually goes through the VPN.

FAQ

Is there an official AdGuard VPN GUI for Linux? No. AdGuard ships official VPN GUI clients for Windows and macOS, while the Linux client is the adguardvpn-cli command-line tool. Vantah is an independent, unofficial third-party front-end for that CLI and is not an AdGuard product.

Does Vantah work without an AdGuard VPN account or subscription? No. Vantah only drives adguardvpn-cli, so you need the CLI installed and a valid AdGuard VPN account/subscription. You can sign in from the Vantah UI via the device-code flow — see Requirements.

Which Linux distributions are supported? The AppImage and the tar.gz archive run on any x86-64 distribution (the .NET runtime is bundled); the .deb targets Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, and the .rpm targets Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE and derivatives. Only x86-64 builds are published — see Download.

Does Vantah need root? Day-to-day use does not, and packaging/install.sh installs into your home directory without root. Root is involved only where your system requires it: installing the .deb/.rpm packages, and the optional kill_cmd = pkexec kill used to force-terminate a CLI process — see Configuration and trust model.

Do I need to install the .NET runtime? No. The published AppImage, tar.gz, .deb and .rpm builds are self-contained — the runtime is embedded. The .NET 10 SDK is needed only to build from source, see Building and running for development.

Does Vantah send anything over the network on its own? Only an update check against this repository's GitHub releases page, which can be switched off in Settings. Vantah has no telemetry of its own; everything else (traffic, account, telemetry options) belongs to adguardvpn-cli, whose settings Vantah merely exposes.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 bolikcraft

Vantah is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version — full text in the LICENSE file. In short: you may freely use, modify, and distribute the software, but any distributed derivative work must also be released under the GPL with its source code available. The software is provided "AS IS", without any warranty.

The GPL covers only Vantah's own code. The adguardvpn-cli tool and other AdGuard software are not covered by it, are not bundled with Vantah, and are distributed under AdGuard's own terms. Vantah invokes adguardvpn-cli as a separate process and does not link against it.

Disclaimer

The software is provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. You use Vantah at your own risk; the authors and copyright holders are not liable for any claim, damages, or other loss arising from the use of the software.

Vantah is a networking tool that manages a VPN connection through the external adguardvpn-cli utility. You are solely responsible for complying with the applicable laws of your jurisdiction, as well as with AdGuard's license and terms of use.