You asked us and we did. VPN on your own server with XRay Reality in 5 minutes with Amnezia

Hello everyone! This is the Amnezia team.

We read the comments under our posts and know that one of the most frequently asked questions is – when will XRay be? So, we have added XRay to the AmneziaVPN application, or rather the Reality protocol from XRay for all platforms – IOS, Android, Windows, Linux and MacOS. If you do not have the latest release yet, quickly download and create a VPN on your own server in a couple of clicks with one of the most secure and fastest protocols in the world, below we will tell you a little about it, and at the end of the article there will be step-by-step instructions on how to do this.

Why is XRay Reality so popular?

The thing is that Reality is suitable for countries with the highest level of Internet censorship, it is currently used in China and Iran, it is protected from detection by active probing methods.

REALITY can recognize censors already at the TLS handshake stage. If REALITY sees that its client is coming to it, the server starts a VPN tunnel for it, and if any other request comes to port 443, the TLS connection is transferred to some other real site, for example, google.com, where the censor will receive a real TLS certificate from google.com and all the real data from this site.

From the point of view of traffic analysis systems, this looks like a connection to a real site, the server returns a real TLS certificate of this site, and in general everything (including the TLS fingerprint of the server) looks very real and does not arouse suspicion.

It is especially pleasant that the performance of REALITY and the connection speed of the protocol are really good, in comparison, for example, with the OpenVPN over Cloak bundle.

OpenVPN over Cloak works on the same principle, but unlike REALITY, for some reason it is detected by modern DPI systems in Iran and according to some reports in China. If anyone is interested, you can read more about it here – https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/327. And in general on https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues a lot of useful information on issues of blocking and how to bypass it.

Initially, we started making the AmneziaFree service with Cloak, but at the beginning of 2024, DPI learned to recognize and block it in Iran, and we still don’t know if this will be fixed, so we are thinking of completely abandoning Cloak. At the same time, XRay was improved by developers a month after the blocking, and is currently not blocked in either Iran or China, and most importantly, it has constant support and updates, which means it can be used in the long term and together with our other services.

What else does XRay Core give to Amnesia?

And now the best part. AmneziaVPN has now become a full-fledged XRay client, and can open any configs that are supported by XRay, such as VMESS, VLESS and even Shadowsocks, all of them fully work in the application, so if you have any, you can add them to Amnezia and use them along with other protocols. By the way, keys with VMESS, VLESS and Shadowsocks can be purchased from our friends from VPNPay .

All this opens up wide opportunities for other projects that want to distribute their paid or free VPN, but do not want to create their own VPN client and support it (we strongly encourage this).

It must be admitted that it was very difficult to “saw” almost all possible VPN protocols into one VPN client (IKEv2 is still left, we will add it by autumn), considering that this is a cross-platform application on C++/Qt. For this we even had to fork XRay Core and Tun2Socks.

And now, as we promised, let's move on to the step-by-step guide.

How to create your own VPN with Reality on your own server.

Buy a VPS server from any hosting provider, it usually costs no more than a good VPN, and the VPN you set up on it can be shared with several more people. Thus, for about $5 a month, you get your own VPN for yourself, family and friends.
Here are detailed instructions with pictures on how to do this for some hosting providers https://amnezia.org/ru/starter-guidebut you can choose any other hosting to purchase VPS, it is only important to comply with the minimum system requirements, which can be selected when purchasing.
Minimum system requirements for VPS:
Operating system – Linux, Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 11 is suitable.
Supported processor architecture – x86-64
Virtualization – KVM.
IPv4 address support
RAM – recommended 2 GB, but not less than 1 GB.
No pre-installed software or control panel required.
Download the latest version of the AmneziaVPN app for your device (the app is free and open source):
Android – Google Play
iOS – App Store
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android APK – Download from amnezia.org or Download from GitHub.
After purchasing a VPS, a letter from the hosting provider will be sent to your email about server activation. The letter should contain the IP, User name or User ID, and Password, this is the data that will need to be entered into the Amnezia application.

Next, the application will prompt you to select a protocol or censorship level, click “Select protocol” and select XRay Reality, wait a couple of minutes
Done! You can use and share VPN.
How to use Reality correctly?
By default, Amnezia assigns a default site for all users, if you are in Russia this will be enough, at least at the time of writing. However, if you want to mask Reality as much as possible from traffic analysis systems, change the masking site in the protocol settings.
This must be a server from another country (i.e. not the one you are in), it must not be blocked, it must support TLSv1.3 and HTTP/2 connections, and have a home page that is not redirected.
If you are too lazy to come up with something and search, take the website of some popular international corporation.
Well, if you don’t want to bother with setting up a VPN on your own server, we have a completely free VPN AmnesiaFree (maybe its functions will be enough for you), and just recently a VPN for all sites appeared – Amnesia Premium with locations in the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Sweden and the USA for tunneling all traffic, i.e. a regular VPN from Amnezia.
and we are already working on a cooler version.