Quick VPN with Yandex Cloud

What is it?

There are days, when you need to access a web-site hosted in Russia, which has prevented the out-of-the-country access. Unfortunately, some utility providers do this, yet you still need to pay for the utilities when you have fled the country.

Yandex.Cloud allows you to create a low-cost preemptive virtual machine for under a rouble per hour. Instruction and the script in this repo help you create such a virtual machine.

How to prepare?

1. Set up Yandex Cloud account.
2. Configure the billing account in Yandex Cloud.
3. Install yc.
4. Restart your shell to make yc command available.
5. Configure yc by calling yc init.
6. Install Outline Manager and Outline Client on the device where you want to use VPN.
7. Ensure you have an SSH-key generated, with public key saved as ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
8. Download do.sh and run it, following the on-screen instructions. Keep the script running for now.
9. Open Outline Manager, choose "Set up Outline anywhere" and copy the config displayed by the script (including curly brackets) into Step 2.
10. Copy created "Access key" of the server from Outline Manager.
11. Open Outline Client, add server, paste copied "Access key" and connect to VPN.
12. When you're finished, press "Enter" in the terminal where you have the script running. It should remove the created virtual machine. Check that the server was removed from Yandex Cloud.

Below is the example produced by this script (so you'll know what to look for in the output):

{"apiUrl":"https://51.250.74.81:61648/ui2mtnfFtm-awV8pbIcVQQ","certSha256":"FA3A90DD2C1ADCF13B724872C784C44DC71D28B7A3A927A52172F774363A6F71"}

Example of "Access key" of the server from Outline Manager:

ss://Y2hhY2hhMjAtaWV0Zi1wb2x5MTMwNTpsQVY3S00wSTB1bWdCZG16ZmxXNG5G@51.250.74.81:45142/?outline=1