mheistermann / openfortivpn-webview

Application to perform the SAML single sing-on and easily retrieve the SVPNCOOKIE needed by openfortivpn.

The application will simply open the SAML page to let you sign in. As soon as the SVPNCOOKIE is set, the application will print it to stdout and exit.

The application comes in two flavors:

• openfortivpn-webview-qt
• openfortivpn-webview-electron

They should be equivalent, but openfortivpn-webview-qt may have some issues with some SAML providers.

openfortivpn-webview-electron is readily available, see the instructions on how to install it.

Usage

Obtain SVPNCOOKIE for host vpn-gateway:

openfortivpn-webview vpn-gateway

You can also specify an authentication realm (normally not required):

openfortivpn-webview vpn-gateway:1234 --realm=foo

By default the application builds the SAML URL using the given host, port and realm. You can alternatively provide an already built URL:

openfortivpn-webview --url 'https://vpn-gateway:1234/remote/saml/start?realm=foo'

The application exits automatically as soon as it prints SVPNCOOKIE to stdout. You can change this behavior passing --keep-open. The application will in this case stay open and keep printing SVPNCOOKIE as its value changes, thus generating a stream of text.

The application does not print SVPNCOOKIE until it finds a URL matching the regular expression passed to --url-regex. If no regular expression is specified, the application will look for URLs containing /sslvpn/portal.html. Waiting for such URL allows to deal with concurrent VPN sessions when the gateway is configured to allow a single active session.

The inner Chromium engine may print a lot of messages. You can disable them to only see the messages of the application.

# If you use the Qt variant
QT_LOGGING_RULES="*=false;webview=true" QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--enable-logging --log-level=3" openfortivpn-webview vpn-gateway

# If you use the Electron variant
openfortivpn-webview --enable-logging --log-level=3 vpn-gateway

Proxy servers

If you have to use an http proxy to access the vpn gateway or the SAML id provider, you can pass the --proxy-server option to Chromium.

Note that when using the Electron variant, all command line options are also passed along to Chromium.

# If you use the Qt variant
QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--proxy-server=proxy.example.com:8080" openfortivpn-webview vpn-gateway

# If you use the Electron variant
openfortivpn-webview vpn-gateway --proxy-server=proxy.example.com:8080

Passing command line options when using npm start

If you use npm start to start the Electron variant, you need to separate the command line options to the application from the command line options to npm using --, like this:

npm start myvpnhost -- --proxy-server=proxy.example.com:8080