PrivateInternetAccess OpenVPN - Transmission

Building and running the container

To build this container, clone the repository and cd into it. There are a few options on how to configure the container, let's look at the simplest one first. In order to connect to PIA VPN you need to put your username and password in the piaconfig/credentials.txt file.

Once this is done, you're ready to build and start your container.

Build it:

docker build -t="docker-transmission-openvpn" .

Run it:

sudo docker run --privileged  -d -v /your/storage/path/:/data -p 9091:9091 docker-transmission-openvpn

This will build the image with default settings. What this means is that the VPN connects to PIA Netherlands with your credentials, starts Transmission WebUI with authentication disabled and Transmission will store your torrents to /your/storage/path/completed. Transmission assumes "completed, incomplete and watch" exists in /your/storage/path

Access the WebUI

But what's going on? My http://my-host:9091 isn't responding? This is because the VPN is active, and since docker is running in a different ip range than your client the response to your request will be treated as "non-local" traffic and therefore be routed out through the VPN interface.

How to fix this

There are several ways to fix this. You can pipe and do fancy iptables or ip route configurations on the host and in the Docker image. But I found that the simplest solution is just to proxy my traffic. Start a Nginx container like this:

docker run -d -v /path/to/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx.conf:ro -p 8080:80 nginx

Where /path/to/nginx.conf has this content:

events {
  worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
  server {
    listen 80;
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://host.ip.address.here:9091;
    }
  }
}

Your Transmission WebUI should now be avaliable at "http://your.host.ip.addr:8080/ Change the port in the docker run command if 8080 is not suitable for you.

Good luck!