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Troubleshooting

Common problems and their fixes.

In this guide

activevpn: command not found

The package isn't installed, or the script directory isn't on your PATH.

pip install activevpn
python -m pip show activevpn   # prints install location

ModuleNotFoundError

The runtime dependencies are missing. Install them from requirements.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt

This installs psutil, rich, pyfiglet, and requests.

Exit code 2 / "Could not fetch Public IP"

The public IP/DNS APIs are unreachable. Check your connection, then confirm the endpoints in IP_API_URLS and DNS_LEAK_API_URL (see configuration.md). Run with --debug to see which endpoints were attempted.

--kill fails with permission errors

--kill needs administrator/root privileges:

sudo activevpn --kill          # Linux/macOS

On Windows, open the terminal as Administrator. If a process still refuses to stop after 3 seconds, use --kill-force.

Garbled characters in the output

On some Windows consoles (legacy cp1252), non-ASCII symbols can render as ?. The confidence bar uses only ASCII # and -. If you still see issues, run inside Windows Terminal, use the --export txt output, or switch the console codepage to UTF-8:

chcp 65001

My config file is ignored

  • The file must be named config.toml under ~/.config/neostore/ActiveVPN/ (Linux), %LOCALAPPDATA%\neostore\ActiveVPN\ (Windows), or set explicitly with ACTIVEVPN_CONFIG.
  • Keys must match config.py constants exactly (uppercase).
  • Only string, list, and boolean values are applied.

See configuration.md.

History shows old scans

History accumulates across runs. Use activevpn --clear-history to wipe it, or delete the history file in the data dir.

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