[Question/Possible feature request] Is there a way to monitor traffic with this VPN?

[oliverswitzer]

Hi,

I'm currently trying to build a personal project that will help notify me when I'm spending too much time on unwanted distractions on my phone. Since Apple has not made it's iOS digital wellness data available through an API, I've come to the conclusion that the only way to detect when I'm using certain social media apps is to install a VPN on to my device that I control, which I can use to monitor my own network traffic.

There is an app blocker called Freedom that already uses this technique of installing a VPN to block unwanted distractions, but I have some ideas for additional features that are not on their roadmap.

I'm planning on deploying Algo to digital ocean. I'm wondering if Algo has a way for me to set up said traffic monitoring? Ideally, I'd like some way to forward information about specific traffic to another server where I can process the info and send push notifications to my phone (this server could also live in Digital Ocean if that makes things easier). I did try to peruse through the Algo codebase a bit, but I'm not super familiar with VPN architecture, and don't really know where to look.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

[jackivanov]

Hi @oliverswitzer,

At the time being we don't have this feature, although you can leverage dnscrypt-proxy to block certain domains

• https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Public-blacklists
• https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/blob/master/config.cfg#L50