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I'm an Ubuntu GNOME user and I was wondering if there is a way to be able to automatically reconnect to a VPN on disconnection. I'm using the OpenVPN protocol.

I've checked Network Manager thoroughly but could not find such an option, only to connect to the VPN when connected to a specific WiFi.

OpenVPN has a build-in mechanism to automatically detect dead links and reconnect. In Network Manager go to "Edit Connections", select your VPN connection and choose "Edit". In the "VPN" tab click on "Advanced..." and go to the "General" Tab. There you have two relevant options:

"Specify ping interval" tell OpenVPN how frequently to check if the link is still alive. "Specify exit or restart ping" tells it how long to wait until it takes action and which action to take.

Example: My setting are "30 / ping-restart / 300". This means OpenVPN checks every 30 seconds if the link is still active. If the link is down for 300 seconds it initiates a restart.

This way there is no need for external scripts...

After a bit of digging I found this answer, tested it (on Ubuntu GNOME 15.04) and so far it seems working.

The only thing I might add is that once the script file is created it doesn't necessarily need to be saved to your /home folder. You can save it anywhere, make it executable and add it to the list of startup programs.

As of 18.10 (cannot check in earlier versions) VPN connections in NetworkManager have a setting vpn.persistent which does just that: reconnects to a VPN on connection loss until you disconnect manually. It is set to "no" by default and unfortunately isn't exposed neither in Gnome Network Settings nor in nm-connection-editor.

But you can set it through a CLI like this:

nmcli connection modify <Your VPN connection name> vpn.persistent yes

The connection must exist before you do that, of course

After claiming it was a SMOP (Simple Matter of Programming), I wrote a bash script that monitors for "Link Down", then executes a user script. Less CPU usage, more responsive than the while true....sleep 30 method. See my answer at here. It's about "rotating WiFi connections", but will probably work for you, too

this script will work on 16.04 where nmcli con status no longer works:

#!/bin/bash

CON="purple"

STATUS=`nmcli con show --active | grep purple | cut -f1 -d " "`

if [ -z "$STATUS" ]; then

    nmcli con up $CON

fi

I think the complete answer based on other answers goes as follow :

#!/bin/bash +x

  while [ "true" ]

   do

        CON="Your-VPN-Name"

        STATUS=`nmcli con show --active | grep $CON | cut -f1 -d " "`

        if [ -z "$STATUS" ]; then

                echo "Disconnected, trying to reconnect..."

                (sleep 1s && nmcli con up $CON)

        else

                echo "Already connected !"

        fi

        sleep 30

   done