fortigate-web-sslvpn

fortigate-web-sslvpn

This module focuses on the web mode of FortiGate SSL VPN, if you are looking for the tunnel mode check out openfortivpn.

Motivations

What is the "web mode" ?

According to https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.4.2/administration-guide/869159/ssl-vpn-best-practices, web-only mode provides clientless network access using a web browser with built-in SSL encryption.

You can find a documentation about this mode at https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.4.2/administration-guide/100733/ssl-vpn-web-mode.

Why use it over the "tunnel" mode ?

You may need a script to connect over a service through SSL VPN but you don't want to (or can't) setup FortiClient or openfortivpn on the machine running the script : this is where this module comes in handy.

In my case, I needed to connect to a service through SSL VPN from a serverless API. I couldn't use openfortivpn because it requires root access to setup the VPN tunnel. Also I would've only one connection at a time, while I needed multiple connections at the same time. In that case, using the "web mode" is the only solution.

Installation

You can use any package manager you want, here are some examples:

# NPM
npm install fortigate-web-sslvpn

# Yarn
yarn add fortigate-web-sslvpn

# pnpm
pnpm add fortigate-web-sslvpn

Usage

import { initWebSSLVPNSession } from "fortigate-web-sslvpn";

// Authenticate and create a VPN session.
const vpn = await initWebSSLVPNSession(
  "username",
  "password",
  "https://sslvpn.example.com" // No trailing slash or path.
);

// Use the VPN session to make requests.
const response = await vpn.request("https://service.example.com", {
  method: "POST",
  body: JSON.stringify({ hello: "world" }),
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Authorization": "Bearer DummyTokenForExample"
  }
});

// Returns a `Headers` object containing the response headers.
// Learn more at <https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Headers>
console.log(response.headers);

// Status code of the response as a number, e.g. `200`
console.log(response.status);

// The response body as a string.
console.log(response.data); // e.g. `{"hello":"world"}`

// You can also close the VPN session when you're done.
// Otherwise, it usually expires after 5 minutes.
await vpn.close();