Using VPN on Stremalit Cloud

Community Cloud
1

Hi everyone,

I’m building a Streamlit app that allows users to check trends on any topic using PyTrends. On my local machine, I was able to bypass Google’s bot detection by programmatically starting a VPN in Python:

import secrets, random, subprocess

password = secrets.token_urlsafe(16)
port = random.randint(10000, 60000)

print(f"Starting VPN on port {port} with password {password}")
print("VPN is running... connect with the above password and port.")

vpn_process = subprocess.Popen(
    ["pvpn", "-p", password, "--udp", "--port", str(port)],
    stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
    stderr=subprocess.PIPE,
    text=True
)

This worked fine locally, but when I deploy the app on Streamlit Cloud, it doesn’t seem to work—probably because I don’t have access to run VPNs or change network settings on their servers. I also don’t have any external proxy servers.

Does anyone have suggestions on:

  1. Whether there’s a way to use VPNs or rotating IPs inside a Streamlit app?

  2. Why this approach is not working for streamlit cloud yet working for local machine?

Thanks in advance for any advice!