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Private Internet Access Desktop Client

This is the desktop client for the Private Internet Access VPN service. It consists of an unprivileged thin GUI client (the "client") and a privileged background service/daemon (the "daemon"). The daemon runs a single instance on the machine and is responsible for not only network configuration but also settings and account handling, talking to PIA servers as necessary. The client meanwhile runs in each active user's desktop and consists almost entirely of presentation logic. No matter how many users are active on a machine, they control the same single VPN instance and share a single PIA account.

The project uses Qt 5 for cross-platform development, both in the client and daemon. The client GUI is based on Qt Quick, which uses declarative markup language and JavaScript and offers hardware accelerated rendering when available. Qt and Qt Quick tend to be more memory and CPU efficient compared to web-based UI frameworks like Electron or NW.js.

Building and developing

The client is intended to be built on the target platform; Windows builds are built on Windows, macOS builds on macOS, and Linux builds on Ubuntu.

The entire product is built using rake, using the supporting framework in the rake/ directory.

Dependencies such as OpenVPN and the Windows TAP driver are included as precompiled binaries under the deps directory in this project for convenience. To recompile any of these, please refer to their corresponding directories and/or repositories for build instructions.

Prerequisites:

• On Windows:
  • Git 1.8.2 or later with Git LFS installed
  • Qt 5.15 or later (open source edition)
    • Install CMake (under development tools) to use this project in Qt Creator
  • Visual Studio Community 2019 or Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019
    • Requires VS 16.7 or later
    • The Windows SDK must be at least 10.0.17763.0
    • Install the "Windows 8.1 SDK and UCRT SDK" to get the UCRT redistributable DLLs for 7/8/8.1
  • Debugger: Install Debugging Tools from the Windows 10 SDK
    • The VS installer doesn't include the Console Debugger (CDB), which is needed to debug in Qt Creator. More info: Setting Up Debugger
  • Ruby - includes Rake
  • 7-zip
• On macOS:
  • Git 1.8.2 or later with Git LFS installed
  • Qt 5.15 or later (open source edition)
    • Install CMake (under development tools) to use this project in Qt Creator
  • Mojave or newer
  • Up-to-date version of Xcode
  • Ruby, can be installed using Homebrew with brew install ruby
• On Linux:
  • Debian 9 (Stretch) or newer
    • Supported architectures: x86_64, armhf, arm64
  • Git 1.8.2 or later with Git LFS installed
  • Qt 5.15 or later
    • PIA's build of Qt is recommended: desktop-dep-build releases
    • If you want Qt Creator, also install Qt from qt.io
  • To build natively on the host, install the following development packages:
    • build-essential
    • rake
    • clang (or specific version, clang-7 recommended on Debian Stretch)
    • mesa-common-dev
    • libnl-3-dev (PIA can run without the library installed, but the headers are needed to build)
    • libnl-route-3-dev
    • libnl-genl-3-dev
    • git (needed even in chroot build environment, to determine commit info for version)
  • To build releasable artifacts (always built under Debian 9, and optionally including arm64/armhf cross builds), set up Debian 9 chroots - see "Building for Distribution" - "Linux" below

Cloning the repository

Before cloning the Git repository, first make sure Git LFS is installed and initialized:

> git lfs version
git-lfs/2.3.4 (GitHub; windows amd64; go 1.8.3; git d2f6752f)

> git lfs install
Updated git hooks.
Git LFS initialized.

After this, cloning the repository normally should also fetch the precompiled binaries:

> git clone https://github.com/pia-foss/desktop.git
...
Filtering content: 100% (24/24), 17.13 MiB | 1.89 MiB/s, done.

Build system

The following targets can be passed to rake. The default target is stage, which stages the built client, daemon, and dependencies for local testing (but does not build installers, tests, etc.)