this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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What's gluetun? (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 days ago by paequ2@lemmy.today to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Occasionally I see people mention gluetun.

  • What's gluetun? Seems like it's a VPN client? What's special about it?
  • How do you use it in your setup?
  • Do I need to know about this if I use Tailscale on the host for connecting to my VPN?
  • Would gluetun allow me to use an additional VPN provider for certain apps without messing with the host Tailscale?
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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What's gluetun? Seems like it's a VPN client? What's special about it?

Gluetun can connect to multitude of VPNs, but most importantly it can be used to force other containers to use only the gluetun network, meaning if you disconnect from VPN for whatever reason, the other containers don't suddenly send data over non-VPN network.

So if you're torrenting and use gluetun to provide internet to the qBittorrent container, you won't accidentally reveal your real IP if your provider's server goes down for a few seconds.

How do you use it in your setup?

Configure it to connect to my VPN, create a file with the public port it uses, configure qBittorrent to only use gluetun for network and some script which reads the file with public port and changes it in qBittorrent.

Do I need to know about this if I use Tailscale on the host for connecting to my VPN?

Depends. I like having everything container related in the containers. Sometimes I need to do something without VPN, this would limit me. Also, if you don't configure disconnect on VPN connection loss in a different way (interface binding), you risk revealing your IP.

Would gluetun allow me to use an additional VPN provider for certain apps without messing with the host Tailscale?

Yes. Though you would be double VPNed: App -> gluetun -> host VPN -> target server. That would probably add some latency.

[–] Mora@pawb.social 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

meaning if you disconnect from VPN for whatever reason, the other containers don't suddenly send data over non-VPN network.

Is that 100% certain? I think I can recall stories from 15 years ago, where torrent clients had kill switches and they still leaked data.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 14 hours ago

That really depends on the implementation. In the case of gluetun, yes, no data can leak.

In Linux, by interface binding, no data can leak as well. No idea how Windows network stack is implemented.