📅 Updated: May 17, 2020 (Originally published: February 2, 2019)

The Great Firewall of China restricts you from using Google. But you can easily setup your own Google bypass if you have some skills and.. NGINX!

Pre-Requisites

• A VPS with CentOS 7. For example, tiniest Linode plan will run you only $5/mo.
• Your own domain name (subdomain or bare IP setup will do as well)

Setup Google mirror

yum install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
yum install nginx-module-google

This installs stable NGINX and the key component of the solution – Google mirror module, as well its dependency – the substitutions module.

Then in your nginx.conf, load the modules at the top of the file:

load_module modules/ngx_http_subs_filter_module.so;
load_module modules/ngx_http_google_filter_module.so;

Now create a configuration for a domain or IP address, and in the server {} section put

server {
    server_name your.example.com;
    location / {
        google on;
    }
}

Reload or restart NGINX, and viola! You have your own Google search at your.example.com. Wasn’t that easy? 🙂

For additional configuration directives of the Google mirror module (e.g. changing the language), refer to its documentation.