Master WireGuard on Linux: Step-by-Step Installation, Kernel Tips, and One-Click Script

Prerequisites

WireGuard requires matching kernel, kernel-devel and kernel-headers packages; on Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora the packages are kernel, kernel-devel, kernel-headers, while on Debian/Ubuntu they are kernel and linux-headers. Without all three only wireguard-tools is installed and the VPN will not work.

Since Linux 5.6 the kernel already contains WireGuard, so a system with kernel ≥ 5.6 only needs wireguard-tools (e.g. sudo apt install wireguard -y on Ubuntu 20.04).

Installing on older kernels

For apt‑based distributions you can skip kernel upgrade. For rpm‑based distributions (CentOS, etc.) the kernel must be upgraded via ELRepo:

$ rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
$ rpm -Uvh http://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.0-3.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm
$ yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel repolist
$ yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel install kernel-ml.x86_64 -y
$ yum remove kernel-tools-libs.x86_64 kernel-tools.x86_64 -y
$ yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel install kernel-ml-tools kernel-ml-devel kernel-ml-headers -y
$ grub2-editenv list
$ grub2-set-default 'CentOS Linux (5.7.2-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64) 7 (Core)'
$ reboot
$ uname -r

WireGuard installation

After the kernel is ready, follow the official documentation or use the one‑click script from 秋水逸冰: /opt/wireguard.sh -s The script supports both source compilation and package installation, automatically creates a wg0 interface, generates client configs and QR‑code images, adjusts firewall rules, picks a random listening port (1024‑20480), and provides commands to add, delete, list clients, check version and upgrade to the latest release.

If you prefer manual configuration, remove the auto‑generated files with rm -rf /etc/wireguard/* and generate keys and config files yourself (see “WireGuard 的搭建使用与配置详解”).

For a web UI you can try Wg Gen Web: https://github.com/vx3r/wg-gen-web.

References

https://www.wireguard.com/install/

https://fuckcloudnative.io/posts/wireguard-docs-practice/

https://github.com/vx3r/wg-gen-web