strongMan is a management interface for strongSwan. Based on Django and Python, strongMan provides a user friendly graphical interface to configure and establish IPsec connections. It supports

• RSA / ECDSA asymmetric encryption
• EAP with username and password
• EAP-TLS
• serveral authentification rounds

The strongMan application implements a persistent connection and asymmetric key management. Several common connection use cases are implemented and can be used in few configuration steps.

Requirements:

• strongSwan with vici plugin
• python3/pip3
• git
• virtualenv

Run the following commands to install strongMan.

git clone https://github.com/strongswan/strongMan.git
cd strongMan
sudo ./setup.py install

We have installed strongMan with all it's requirements in a virtual environment and loaded a default user into the database.

To guarantee data consistency between strongMan and strongSwan, configure a script in the strongSwan configuration, which will be executed on the startup of strongSwan.

If you aren’t planning on setting up a systemd service, do the following: Put these lines into in "/etc/strongswan.d/strongMan.conf". Replace ’pathTostrongMan’ with the path, where you installed strongMan.

charon {
  start-scripts {
    strongman = /pathTostrongMan/configloader.py
  }
}

If you will configure strongMan with a systemd service, follow these instructions to get the Configuration Loader running. Put the following line into "strongswan-swanctl.service". Replace "pathTostrongMan" with the path, where you installed strongMan.

ExecStartPost=/pathTostrongMan/configloader.py

Now we can start the strongMan server.

sudo ./run.py

The server is now accessible on http://localhost:1515 Username: John, Password: Lennon@1940

If you want to run strongMan permanently in the background you can install strongMan as a systemd service.

sudo ./setup.py add-service # Adds the service and additionally a launcher icon

Removes the service and the launcher icon

sudo ./setup.py remove-service