Gluetun fork - Wireguard and Port Forwarding providers ONLY!

[wolffcatskyy]

First off, gluetun is great. I've been thinking about this for a while that for the torrenting/self-hosting use case, which I'd guess is the majority of gluetun's userbase, the only combination that actually matters anymore is WireGuard + a provider with port forwarding. OpenVPN is legacy at this point, every major provider supports WG, and honestly a VPN without port forwarding is useless for P2P.

When you filter for WG + port forwarding support, the provider list gets really short really fast. You're basically looking at ProtonVPN (NAT-PMP), PIA (their proprietary API), AirVPN (static ports from their web panel), and then a generic custom provider for everyone else like TorGuard, OVPN, PureVPN etc using FIREWALL_VPN_INPUT_PORTS. That's 3 first-class providers plus a fallback, vs 20+ today.

So the idea would be: strip out OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, the HTTP proxy, and the providers that don't do WG+PF. Keep the firewall/routing kill switch and health checking because that's the actual hard and valuable part. Image goes from ~41MB to probably under 15MB, and the maintenance surface drops massively.

I'm not suggesting gluetun itself should change - the swiss army knife thing clearly works for a ton of people. I'm more asking whether you'd be open to a blessed fork that stays in the ecosystem (maybe linked from the wiki), or if you'd have any interest in a slim build variant within gluetun itself, or if you'd rather I just go do this independently.

Happy to do all the work either way. Just wanted to check with you before forking.

I'm also planning to automate server list updates via CI instead of baking them into the binary - pulling from provider APIs on a schedule. If that's useful upstream I'd be happy to contribute it back.