Vipinator: VPN Toggle for macOS Menu Bar

Living in Russia means I toggle my VPN on and off quite a lot. Some websites break without a VPN, while others break with it. Unfortunately, my VPN app (I use Shadowrocket) doesn’t have a menu bar item or global shortcuts to make this easier.

So, I made Vipinator. It’s an app that uses the networksetup binary on macOS to list and manage VPN connections. It displays a lightning bolt in the menu bar, letting you toggle VPN connections from its menu.

The app is MIT licensed and fully open source. You can grab the dmg file from GitHub releases or install it via Homebrew.

It’s interesting to note how I’m posting about glee and Vipinator less than a week apart, but I’ve always been interested in systems programming. I was very excited to finally get in the mood for hacking away on these tools. It’s also the first time I’ve used the SystemConfiguration framework in a macOS app, so I learned some stuff from it.

If you’d prefer not to install a separate app but are a Raycast user, there’s a Connect to VPN extension that I contributed to, which has similar functionality.