The other day, I was configuring the network on a Rocky Linux machine with my friend Francesco. Specifically, we were configuring WireGuard using nmcli, and we found the experience less than stellar.

I must say, being used to command-line configuration on Cisco equipment or Ubiquiti EdgeOS devices, I find their command-line interfaces much more intuitive. Since I like having my router virtualized, up until a few years ago I was running an instance of VyOS. However, I abandoned using the project after their policy change regarding the build of LTS images and the availability of the source code.

Starting with VyOS 1.4, only source code and Debian package repositories of the rolling release (the current branch) are publicly available. The source code and pre-built Debian package repositories of LTS releases are only available to subscription holders (customers and active community members with contributors subscriptions).

from VyOS 1.5 documentation

Consequently, also considering that I’m really enjoying an OpenBSD-based infrastructure for other reasons, I decided to start writing the foundation to create an OpenBSD-based network appliance, equipped with a command-line interface similar to that of VyOS.

Obviously, it won’t be completely one-to-one compatible with VyOS, as that is not the goal. My main objective is to have a router appliance with extremely solid networking foundations, guaranteed by the entire OpenBSD network stack, combined with the convenience of being fully configurable via CLI.

Today (well, yesterday), VyBSD was born.

The project is live on Codeberg. At the moment, it is in an embryonic phase, but I will try to dedicate as much of my free time to it as possible to arrive at a working system.

The planned components are:

If you are curious or would like to contribute, the project is completely open source!