About providers

[m4r1k]

Hey there,

I'd love to consolidate all my clients under the same umbrella: Passepartout.

Currently Passepartout has no built-in profiles for Proton VPN and private internet only for OpenVPN.

Would it be possible to add them?

Once they are in, I'm personally planning to buy the Forever tier.

@keeshux Thanks a lot already for this amazing effort!!

[keeshux]

Hi @m4r1k, and thank you.

Actually, the app is going in the opposite direction: provider support will soon be discontinued. There's not enough interest in the feature, and it demands both high-effort maintenance and providers' collaboration to be useful.

I'm very unhappy with the provider integrations today, and a bit sad because it was the initial purpose of the app. However, I'd rather drop a half-assed feature while taking the time to focus and offer something better in the future.

Probably not the answer you expected, heh.

[m4r1k]

Yeah totally not the answer I was looking for.. I fully understand providing quality features over subpar, buggy, incomplete ones but at the same time, having something like Passepartout with built-in profiles makes it a very compelling and convenient one. Gluetun has great built-in support for plenty of providers. Not sure if you can/want get inspired tho. Definitely for better maintainability profiles download/update and app version should be decoupled.

[keeshux]

Gluetun's strategy is similar to the "old" Passepartout. It aggregates providers' metadata server-side:

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-servers
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-servers/blob/main/.github/workflows/update-servers.yml

I used this approach when I created Passepartout, then in 2024/25 I changed the strategy to incrementally avoid leaking providers' infrastructures (though a few are still "cached" online). The recent versions of Passepartout run JavaScript code that fetches provider metadata directly on the client's behalf, instead of fetching distilled metadata from a third party (GitHub). This is more annoying to implement, but fixes the data leak and saves me from the burden of maintaining a middle layer, like gluetun still does.

Moreover, the other burden of providers is having a universal interactive UI. Gluetun doesn't need that, which makes the feature easier to reason about.

However, over the years, different goals have emerged in Passepartout: privacy, near-zero-deps (you hardly see this in 2026), native cross-platform code, self-hosting. Providers don't fit that model anymore. Other features will come if my cross-platform effort ever settles. 8)

That being said, this is a discussion I'll keep around. I have a radically different idea for providers, but it's not a priority today.