Self-hosted browser with VPN from certain region

I have a rather generic setup on my old Mac-mini (Ubuntu OS, everything on Docker, Traefik reverse-proxy, Cloudflare DNS), which is mostly identical as the rest of you, I imagine :slight_smile:

For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking if there’s a good solution for my problem and since I love to lurk here, I thought I’d ask you all.

I have to access sites from my home country fairly often and a lot of them have recently started blocking international IPs. So now I always need to use VPN (got Surfshark recently) to access those sites, which is fairly annoying process on PC for me.

Is there a way I can deploy a browser (preferably using docker), which always runs on a VPN connection and I can access it local network? So, trying a to find a similar project like arch-delugevpn, but for chrome/firefox.

Also, I don’t want to expose it on internet for security reasons.

Please feel free to share any other novel ideas as well!

On the desktop on which you run your browser, run this command to create a SOCKS server with ssh:

ssh -v -g -D 8119 yourname@yourserver

… then configure your browser to proxy through SOCKS server at address 0.0.0.0 port 8119, and all of your browser connections will appear to originate from “yourserver”. All major browsers offer the option to proxy through SOCKS.

You will need to acquire a VM or physical host for “yourserver” which is located inside your home country.

Is Opera not a sufficient solution for you?

This is new to me, thanks! I’ll play around with this :slight_smile:

Sorry, haven’t used it in a decade, does it start with VPN always or something?

I don’t use much myself anymore, but if I recall correctly it has a simple toggle on the URL bar, so you can switch the VPN on and off. It has its limits, and it’s not exactly a privacy friendly option because it still goes through VPN servers that will ultimately can still snoop on all your traffic. But if you just need to look like you’re visiting from someplace else, it might be a sufficient and easy option.