wtf is vpnx?

VPNX, short for VPN Proxy Exchange, turns a Docker host into a rotating VPN proxy without needing a paid VPN subscription or an account. It works by finding free public OpenVPN server configurations, building a VPN tunnel to one of them, and exposing that tunnel as a standard SOCKS5 and HTTP proxy that any tool such as curl, a browser, or a scraper can connect through. To find working VPN servers, VPNX tries three sources in order: a CSV based API from VPN Gate, a fallback that scrapes the VPN Gate website's table of servers directly, and a GitHub mirror of cached configurations as a last resort. If one source is unavailable, it automatically moves to the next without any manual steps. The project lists its intended use cases as web scraping with rotating IP addresses, testing how a service behaves from different countries, working around rate limits, and hiding the origin address of outgoing traffic. Running it is a single Docker command that grants the container network admin permissions and access to the host's tun device, since it needs to create a real VPN tunnel, and sets an API token used to authenticate all requests. It can also be installed as a small command line wrapper through npm or pip. Once running, a REST API on port 8000 lets a user check status, connect to a VPN server automatically or in a specific country, rotate to a new server, list available server locations by country, and disconnect. The proxy itself listens on port 1080 for SOCKS5 and port 8080 for HTTP, with a username and password that can be fetched from the API. Inside the container, a small FastAPI service manages the OpenVPN connection, while a tool called Dante handles the SOCKS5 side of the proxy and Tinyproxy handles the HTTP side, both routing traffic through whichever VPN tunnel is currently active. The project only runs on Linux Docker hosts because of the specific device and networking permissions it requires, and it is released under the MIT license.