Vantah

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

Status	Locations

Site exclusions	Settings

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

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.
• Packaging and distribution: rpm/deb (AppImage and tar.gz are already published with every release, and there is packaging/install.sh plus application-menu integration).

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.