A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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You can pretty easily install Squid, it's fairly simple to configure and works well for most use cases. Just a plain simple HTTP proxy.
You could also set up a VPN to your home to achieve something similar, by binding some requests to the VPN IP. It's a bit harder to set up however as it involves routing tables, route metrics and conditionally binding the outgoing connection to a specific interface
Thanks, sounds like Squid will be perfect. I’ll just need to figure out some way to connect. I wish I could just open a port, but it hasn’t been working since I enabled IPv6 on my router. Do you think I could make it accessible through cloudflare tunnels?
Probably not, look into wireguard or tailscale.
Cloudflare tunnels won't work as Cloudflare won't tunnel HTTP proxy traffic, at least as far as I know.
What you can do however is have your home server VPN into your remote server, then your remote server will have no problem connecting to Squid over the VPN link. WireGuard is very simple to configure like that, probably 5-10 lines of config on each end. You don't need any routing or forwarding or anything, just a plain VPN with 2 peers that can ping eachother, so no ip_forward or iptables -j MASQUERADE needed or anything that most guides would include. You can also use something like Tailscale, anything that will let the two machines talk to eachother.
Depending on the performance and reliability needs, you could even just forward a port with SSH. Connect to your remote server from the home server with something like ssh -N -R localhost:8088:localhost:8080 $remoteServer and port 8088 on the remote will forward to port 8080 on the home server as long as that SSH connection is up. -N simply makes SSH not open a shell on the remote, dedicating the SSH session to the forwarding. Nice and easy, especially for prototyping.
That seems overcomplicated for me honestly, but now I just thought that I actually can host the scraper on the home server, as the scraper itself only scrapes simple data, and the downloads are by a separate program.
The downloader talks to the scraper through HTTP, which I can publish through CF Tunnels, so it’s perfect.
Besides other answers - you could just use SSH port forwarding. Remote would be your home server, local would be your "cloud" server. You should initiate the connection from the cloud server to your home server. Playing with local ports would enable you filter what domains are used for the proxy.
I rarely use it, so the exact syntax is gone from my memory. It is a bit tricky at first, but definitely not rocket science to figure out.
Once the connection is established - you would point your scraper to https://localhost:localport
This is the most simple solution and probably a lot safer than the alternatives. Another good option would be to use OpenVPN.
I ended up hosting the scraper service on my home server and exposing it through Cloudflare Tunnels, as the service is pretty much just an API that doesn’t really do much data downloads