Feature Requests. Nord Public API deprecated.

[ph202107]

Hi! The NordVPN Public API was a very useful tool, however parts of the API have now been deprecated: https://support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/21586950310801-Discontinuation-of-the-legacy-API-endpoints-on-NordVPN

Would it be possible to add these features to the Linux CLI?

• server load percentage. A common statistic presented in the GUI apps, but not available for Linux. In many cases seeing a high server load will encourage me to choose a different region, in a very small way actually helping with load-balancing. The server load could be presented after the connection is established if not available beforehand. This should also help users with manual or router setups who would like to check the load on a particular server as a typical part of troubleshooting.

This command has worked for years until recently:
curl --silent https://api.nordvpn.com/server/stats/us9305.nordvpn.com | jq .percent

• a way to retrieve or search an updated list of all the available VPN servers. From such a list Linux users could determine the available Double_VPN server-pairs, the server names and locations of the Onion_Over_VPN servers, the highest-numbered servers in a particular region (which may be useful for some streaming services) and other uses.

For just one example, say I would like to connect to the Double_VPN server group in a particular location and from the manual I know that I can specify the first hop with
nordvpn connect --group Double_VPN <location>
Auto-complete appears to show all the countries, including countries where Double_VPN is not available. How could I determine that Sweden supports Double_VPN, and that Sweden pairs with both Switzerland (se-ch) and Netherlands (se-nl) so that I can choose the server-pair that I prefer?

With the Public API this was trivial, but as of 2024/03/05 there seems to be no method to retrieve this information. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm an absolute novice with using any API. The CLI is a great tool and querying the API from the terminal integrated very well, including on remote or headless systems.

I'm sorry to see that these features have been removed, hopefully they can be restored in one form or another. Thank you for your consideration.

[hackthis02]

Using a custom script I was able to load balance sock5 servers for my BitTorrent client. Without this API, there is no feasible way to do this. Resulting in potentially slower network speeds from the users side and stressed servers on the networks side.

[Savolro]

Hi and sorry for a delayed response.

As announced in this notice (https://support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/21586950310801-Discontinuation-of-the-legacy-API-endpoints-on-NordVPN), the legacy API endpoints will no longer be active or recommended for future use. To achieve similar functionality, you can utilize the new API endpoint at https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers/recommendations. This endpoint provides detailed information about VPN exit nodes, including server load, and offers a list of servers based on our recommendations. For a comprehensive list of servers, access https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers. Remember to include "?limit=[value]" in your request to limit the response output.

[Savolro]

Regarding second location selecting for Double VPN - currently it is not supported. Will update this ticket when there are any updates on this.

[Mouseboy007]

Hi and sorry for a delayed response.

As announced in this notice (https://support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/21586950310801-Discontinuation-of-the-legacy-API-endpoints-on-NordVPN), the legacy API endpoints will no longer be active or recommended for future use. To achieve similar functionality, you can utilize the new API endpoint at https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers/recommendations. This endpoint provides detailed information about VPN exit nodes, including server load, and offers a list of servers based on our recommendations. For a comprehensive list of servers, access https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers. Remember to include "?limit=[value]" in your request to limit the response output.

Before it was deprecated, querying https://api.nordvpn.com/server/stats would allow seeing current load on the connected Server. Is there a faster way to do this than querying https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers and then retrospectively grabbing the data from the large raw data dump. accessing the stats directly would be faster for the end user and less resource intensive for NordVPN I would presume

[ph202107]

Filtering by hostname (or IP address) would be ideal, that would download only about 3KB for one server record instead of 20MB for all 6300+ servers. I found a filter for "server id", and that works well:

curl "https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers?limit=1&filters\[servers.id\]=930119" | jq '.[].load'

It will return the record for "be148.nordvpn.com" and then jq can find the load. The problem is I wouldn't know the server id until I download the entire 20MB json, and the json is subject to change as servers are added and removed.

Is there an equivalent filter for hostname? I can't seem to find one. Thanks!

[Mouseboy007]

Filtering by hostname (or IP address) would be ideal, that would download only about 3KB for one server record instead of 20MB for all 6300+ servers. I found a filter for "server id", and that works well:

curl "https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers?limit=1&filters\[servers.id\]=930119" | jq '.[].load'

It will return the record for "be148.nordvpn.com" and then jq can find the load. The problem is I wouldn't know the server id until I download the entire 20MB json, and the json is subject to change as servers are added and removed.

Is there an equivalent filter for hostname? I can't seem to find one. Thanks!

If it helps, how I've ended up doing it in a script is:

CurrentVPNServer=nordvpn status | grep -E "Hostname" | awk -F ": " '{print $2}'
CountryCode=echo $CurrentVPNServer | awk -F"[0-9]+" '{print $1;}' | awk -F": " '{print $1}'

curl --silent "https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers?filters\[country_id\]=$CountryCode&\[servers_groups\]\[identifier\]=legacy_standard&limit=16354" | jq --raw-output '.[] | select(.hostname | contains("'$CurrentVPNServer'")) | [.hostname, .load] | "(.[0]): (.[1])"'

^ As you say, the catch 22 is you have to pull a large amount of data before you can get the data you need to query the data ...

[mike-sirs]

https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers/recommendations returns a sorted list of recommended servers
simple script to update wg on openwrt
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mike-sirs/openwrt-configs/main/nordvpn-wireguard.sh

[bengalih]

Regarding second location selecting for Double VPN - currently it is not supported. Will update this ticket when there are any updates on this.

Please provide proper filter syntax to query only for SOCKS servers using the https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers/ endpoint.
It is inefficient to request the download of all 6300+ servers per query.

[Tuinslak]

Apologies for asking here, but I can't find an answer anywhere.

Is anything replacing https://api.nordvpn.com/vpn/check/full?
A simple query to return whether you're currently protected by NordVPN?

[mariusSincovici]

hi @Tuinslak,
you could use https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/helpers/ips/insights.

[znbaboy]

Hi and sorry for a delayed response.

As announced in this notice (https://support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/21586950310801-Discontinuation-of-the-legacy-API-endpoints-on-NordVPN), the legacy API endpoints will no longer be active or recommended for future use. To achieve similar functionality, you can utilize the new API endpoint at https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers/recommendations. This endpoint provides detailed information about VPN exit nodes, including server load, and offers a list of servers based on our recommendations. For a comprehensive list of servers, access https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers. Remember to include "?limit=[value]" in your request to limit the response output.

Hi. Thank you for this.

I am kind of new to this stuff but I've been using https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers to get a list of servers.

Everything works great after your explanation on how to retrieve the entire list of servers (limit value).

The question I had was, I am trying to get a full list of US only servers. Is there a parameter I can use (like the limit) at the end of the URL so the API only serves me what I need?

Thanks!

[mariusSincovici]

hi,
there are parameters for limits and to restrict results to a country, filters[country_id] and limit. Setting the limit very high will give you all the servers, e.g.: https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers?filters[country_id]=228&limit=10000

[znbaboy]

hi, there are parameters for limits and to restrict results to a country, filters[country_id] and limit. Setting the limit very high will give you all the servers, e.g.: https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers?filters[country_id]=228&limit=10000

thank you. this works on browsers, but for some reason my curl -s command returns nothing

[mariusSincovici]

does curl -g -s https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers\?filters\[country_id\]\=228\&limit=10000 work?
if not try to remove -s to see the errors.

[znbaboy]

does curl -g -s https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers\?filters\[country_id\]\=228\&limit=10000 work? if not try to remove -s to see the errors.

All i get is HTML title and head saying "301 moved permanently"

[Manwithpants812]

Just so people don't waste time, will "https://api.nordvpn.com/v1/servers" be eventually deprecated for "https://api.nordvpn.com/v2/servers"? I ask as the jsons returned have different structures.

[lacherogwu]

Do you know how its possible to use NordVPN servers to route a request thru their servers using curl

something like

curl -x pl128.nordvpn.com https://checkip.amazonaws.com/

[mike-serchenia]

Do you know how its possible to use NordVPN servers to route a request thru their servers using curl

something like

curl -x pl128.nordvpn.com https://checkip.amazonaws.com/

different OSI level L4 vs l7 what you're asking
resolve ip for checkip.amazonaws.com
route resolved ip via vpn gw

[lacherogwu]

Do you know how its possible to use NordVPN servers to route a request thru their servers using curl
something like

curl -x pl128.nordvpn.com https://checkip.amazonaws.com/

different OSI level L4 vs l7 what you're asking resolve ip for checkip.amazonaws.com route resolved ip via vpn gw

I asked if its possible to use NordVPN server to route requests thru proxy using curl.