every time. Is there a way to make it run that automatically and not need my password?
I could make it launch a terminal and run a script but is there a way that would not require me to type my password every time? Can I maybe give myself permissions to whatever openvpn needs so it doesn't need sudo? How do I find out what those permissions are? Is this the right place to ask?
I'm running KDE/Plasma 6 on Manjaro should that matter
edit: Thanks all! I'm going to try the systemd option, if I can't get that working I'll fall back to the cronjob option, and failing that changing openvpn to not need a password for sudo and launching a script at kde statup.
You can make sudo password-less for a single command (including using specific arguments) though, so even if using sudo were the only solution, it wouldn't be that bad. For example, I have a sudoers entry that allows my user to decrypt my ZFS pool by executing a root-owned script (with permissions 700), but everything else requires a password.
That looks pretty straightforward. I'll look into doing that. And if I can;t make it work I'll go with the cron job option suggested by @Andromeda above
For this in particular, look into setting up NetworkManager to do the openvpn configuration, it has that functionality built in. Otherwise, systemd unit file
I don’t use open VPN so I don’t know for sure, but I think you’re right as the best way to go. Pretty sure I recall Network Manager having an option to set a vpn to be always on when a network connection is made and an option to save credentials.
If you're using NetworkManager, I'd recommend you to use it to create a VPN profile instead and connect to that on startup through the unprivileged nmcli.