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content/blog/openvpncontainer.md

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+---
+title: "OpenVPN Container"
+date: 2020-04-30T23:20:49-04:00
+draft: false
+tags: ["containers"]
+---
+
+Instead of configuring multiple containers to use a VPN, we can setup a VPN container and route the other containers traffic through this container. This post will outline how to do that with [dperson's OpenVPN Container](https://github.com/dperson/openvpn-client).
+
+I'm a huge fan of docker-compose, so here we go:
+
+```yaml
+version: "3.3"
+services:
+  openvpn-client:
+    image: dperson/openvpn-client
+    cap_add:
+      - net_admin
+    security_opt:
+      - label:disable
+    container_name: openvpn-client
+    hostname: openvpn-client
+    environment:
+      - PUID=1000
+      - PGID=1000
+    volumes:
+      - /dev/net:/dev/net:z
+      - /volumes/openvpn-client/vpn/:/vpn
+    restart: always
+```
+
+The `net_admin` capability according to the documentation "perform various network-related operations".  This would make sense since an additional network interface is configured for a VPN connection. The `label:disable` definition is to disable label confinement.
+
+## Routing Traffic through VPN
+
+Let's say your ISP throttles torrent connections and you want to route your `qBittorrent` container so that you can download Linux distributions faster. Here's how you can define it in the docker-compose file.
+
+```yaml
+qbittorrent:
+  image: linuxserver/qbittorrent
+  container_name: qbittorrent
+  environment:
+    - PUID=1000
+    - PGID=1000
+    - UMASK_SET=022
+    - WEBUI_PORT=8000
+  volumes:
+    - /volumes/qbittorrent/config:/config
+    - /volumes/qbittorrent/downloads:/downloads
+  network_mode: service:openvpn-client
+  restart: always
+```
+
+## Network Workarounds
+
+Sadly as of the time of writing, routing a container's traffic makes it lose its ability to belong to a network. I knocked into this when I tried accessing the qBittorrent API. So for the sake of example, if you want to connect to qbittorrent, you need to route the traffic to the openvpn-client container at port 8000 which we specified earlier to be the webui port of qbittorrent.