explaingit

streisandeffect/streisand

23,474ShellAudience · developerComplexity · 4/5DormantLicenseSetup · hard

TLDR

Automation tool that sets up a personal VPN and privacy server on any major cloud provider with one command, giving you multiple censorship-circumvention protocols to choose from.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Auto-provisions servers
      Installs VPN protocols
      Generates setup guides
    Protocols included
      WireGuard
      OpenVPN
      Shadowsocks
      Tor bridge relay
    Cloud providers
      AWS
      DigitalOcean
      Google Cloud
      Azure
    Use cases
      Bypass censorship
      Self-hosted privacy
      Fallback access
    Tech stack
      Shell scripting
      Ansible automation

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Set up a personal VPN server in minutes instead of spending days configuring one manually.

USE CASE 2

Give friends and family in censored regions reliable internet access with multiple fallback protocols.

USE CASE 3

Self-host your own privacy infrastructure instead of trusting commercial VPN providers.

Tech stack

ShellAnsibleWireGuardOpenVPNShadowsocks

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Requires cloud provider account setup, credentials configuration, and waiting for infrastructure provisioning; multiple moving parts (Ansible, WireGuard, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks) to coordinate.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice and license text.

In plain English

Streisand is an automation tool that sets up a personal censorship-circumvention server on a cloud provider with a single command. The problem it targets: in many countries, governments, ISPs, or corporations block access to websites and online services. Breaking through those restrictions normally means either paying for a commercial VPN service (which can itself be blocked or monitored) or spending days configuring your own server securely. Streisand automates that complex server setup. You point Streisand at a cloud provider account, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Linode, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace, and it automatically provisions a new server and installs multiple VPN and privacy protocols: WireGuard, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, OpenConnect, OpenSSH with a proxy, a private Tor bridge relay, and others. Not all need to be installed at once; you choose which. Because some protocols get blocked in certain regions, having several options gives you fallback choices. At the end of the process, Streisand generates an HTML file with clear setup instructions you can share with friends or family who need access. You would use this if you or people you know need reliable internet access in a region with network censorship, and you want to self-host the solution rather than trusting a third-party VPN. Some Unix command-line familiarity is required. The automation is written in Shell and uses Ansible.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I use Streisand to set up a WireGuard server on DigitalOcean for someone in a censored region?
Prompt 2
Show me how to install Streisand and choose which VPN protocols to deploy on my AWS account.
Prompt 3
What are the differences between the VPN protocols Streisand installs, and when would I use each one?
Prompt 4
How do I share the HTML setup instructions Streisand generates with someone who needs to connect?
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.