Mullvad

Mullvad is a VPN service based in Sweden which uses WireGuard.

Installation

Note You may encounter key signature issues when installing the GUI client. If so, follow the instructions here to manually import the key before installation. You only need to follow the Download and import the signing key section. The key should be the same as the one referenced in the PKGBUILD of the AUR mullvad package. After importing, install mullvad-vpn or mullvad-vpn-bin^AUR

The official GUI client is available as mullvad-vpn and mullvad-vpn-bin^AUR.

After installation, you will only have to start/enable mullvad-daemon.service.

Alternatively, see #Manual configuration for manually setting up a Mullvad VPN connection without the official GUI.

Manual configuration

If you do not want to use the official application, you can manually set up a Mullvad VPN connection with WireGuard. As of the 15th January 2026, Mullvad ended OpenVPN support in favour of WireGuard.

If you use NetworkManager you may want to set up dnsmasq to decrease DNS lookup times and decrease the risk of DNS leakages. Follow the steps under DNS_caching_and_conditional_forwarding.

Note Using dnsmasq together with the official app will result in poorer performance as NetworkManager cannot manage per-interface configurations via dnsmasq.

Using WireGuard

Using WG-Quick

Install the wireguard-tools and openresolv packages. Log in to Mullvad with your account and then go to the WireGuard configuration file generator. Under Generate a WireGuard key, click generate key to generate a private key, or you can issue the following command to generate a private key and import it.

# wg genkey

Fill out the next step under Select one or multiple exit locations on the generator and download the file. Extract the file you downloaded to get one or several configuration files depending on your selections. Move the configuration files into /etc/wireguard.

For this example, we have selected Malmö, Sweden (se-mma-wg-001), as our server location, so the downloaded configuration file is named se-mma-wg-001.conf.

As root, run the following command. Replace se-mma-wg-001 with your selected server.

# wg-quick up se-mma-wg-001

To stop it, run the following command.

# wg-quick down se-mma-wg-001

To automatically have it run at boot, enable/start wg-quick@se-mma-wg-001.service.

With NetworkManager

To add a WireGuard connection from a config-file, issue following command in terminal:

# nmcli connection import type wireguard file configuration_file

If the file was called WG1.conf a connection called WG1 should have been added.

If you at any point want to delete the connection, issue the command:

# nmcli connection delete connection_name

To actually start the WireGuard tunnel, issue command:

# nmcli connection up connection_name

Make sure the connection is listed when you run nmcli:

# nmcli

You might want to verify that the private and public keys are correct and corresponds with what you got from your VPN provider:

# WG_HIDE_KEYS=never wg

You may also want to set the connection's DNS priority if exclusive use of Mullvad's DNS is desired; see #DNS leaks.

Mullvad has provided a shell script to automate this process - with a caveat: the automatically generated configuration files do not contain kill switches, which need to be manually added if you so desire.

with KDE

KDE settings (`systemsettings kcm_networkmanagement`), which is a frontend for Network Manager, can either import individual files that you download from mullvad's website (linux configuration), or you can open those files and manually add the values.

The required fields are:

Wiguard config file fields translation to KDE Conections

settings tab	field	mullvad config file
IP V4	Method: Manual	n/a
IP V4	Address/Netmask	Interface.Address (must split on `,` and interpret the mask value. Same for IPV6)
IP V6	Method: Manual (or ignored)	n/a
Wireguard Interface	Private Key	Interface.PrivateKey
Peers	Public Key	Peer.PublicKey
Peers	Allowed IPs	Peer.AllowedIPs
Peers	Endpoint address	Peer.Endpoing (must split on `:`)
Peers	Endpoint port	Peer.Endpoing (must split on `:`)

Note that there is an easy to miss "Peers" button in the "Wireguard Interface" tab to open the Peers section.

To use multiple peers, you will have to open the `zip` file, and add one peer from each individual file on the Peers dialog. Note that the "Wireguard Interface" and IP tabs will be the same for all the files inside the `zip` archive you got from mullbad.

With systemd-networkd

/etc/systemd/network/99-wg0.netdev

[NetDev]
Name=wg0
Kind=wireguard
Description=WireGuard VPN

[WireGuard]
FirewallMark=0x8888
ListenPort=51820
RouteTable=off
PrivateKey=<private key>                               

[WireGuardPeer]
PublicKey=<public key>                                
AllowedIPs=0.0.0.0/0  
AllowedIPs=::0/0
Endpoint=<ip>:<port>

/etc/systemd/network/99-wg0.network

[Match]
Name=wg0

[Network]
Address=<ipv4 addr>/32
Address=<ipv6 addr>/128
DNS=<dns>
DNSDefaultRoute=yes
Domains=~.

[RoutingPolicyRule]
Family=both
SuppressPrefixLength=0
Priority=999
Table=main

[RoutingPolicyRule]
Family=both
FirewallMark=0x8888
InvertRule=true
Table=1000
Priority=1000

[Route]
Gateway=0.0.0.0
Table=1000

[Route]
Gateway=::
Table=1000

For basic kill-switch functionality you can use iptables to block all outgoing connections except those with fwmark 0x8888:

iptables incomplete example

-A OUTPUT -m mark --mark 0x8888 -j ACCEPT
-A OUTPUT -j DROP

DNS leaks

Remember to install the openresolv package to prevent DNS leaks. If you are manually importing WireGuard config files with NetworkManager, you may also want to set the connection's DNS priority to a negative value. This ensures that the system will use Mullvad's DNS server exclusively when the VPN is active.

# nmcli connection modify connection_name ipv4.dns-priority -1
# nmcli connection modify connection_name ipv6.dns-priority -1

IPv6

Mullvad's WireGuard servers fully support IPv6, both inside and outside the tunnel. Users of the GUI app can enable tunneling IPv6 in VPN settings, and enable running the tunnel itself over IPv6 in VPN settings > WireGuard settings > IP version. This may improve performance somewhat by allowing/encouraging larger packet sizes in the WireGuard tunnel. These preferences can be chosen on the WireGuard config generator for manual users.

Preferring IPv6 inside the tunnel

Because the VPN assigns a unique local address and performs network address translation (an unusual way to configure IPv6 connections to the public Internet), getaddrinfo(3) de-prioritizes IPv6 within the tunnel and will only use it when it is the only available option for a connection. To solve this and prefer IPv6 within the tunnel (as is the default on a standard connection), edit the gai.conf(5) file and add the following line:

/etc/gai.conf

label fc00:bbbb:bbbb::/48 1

Automatic configuration

vopono supports automatically generating configuration files for Mullvad, allowing you to instantly run applications via Mullvad connections in temporary network namespaces. Port forwarding is supported.

See also

• Mullvad client source code
• Mullvad FAQ
• vopono