How to disable routing all network traffic through OpenVPN?

To condense Tom Yan's comments into an answer:

• make sure there are no redirect-gateway lines in your client config
• add the following line to filter out any redirect-gateway settings pulled from the VPN server:

pull-filter ignore redirect-gateway

The method is documented in https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/IgnoreRedirectGateway, but it only mentions the --pull-filter command-line parameter, not how to add it to a config file.

If you are using Ubuntu machine as OpenVpn Server you can find OpenVpn server configuration either under

/etc/openvpn/server.conf

or

/etc/openvpn/server/server.conf

if you will cat this file it will look something like this

ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt
push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8"
push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp"
dh none
ecdh-curve prime256v1
tls-crypt tls-crypt.key
crl-verify crl.pem
ca ca.crt
cert server_3BYLUHGJfabF8i1.crt
key server_3BYLUHGJfabF8i1.key
auth SHA256
cipher AES-128-GCM
ncp-ciphers AES-128-GCM
tls-server
tls-version-min 1.2
tls-cipher TLS-ECDHE-ECDSA-WITH-AES-128-GCM-SHA256
client-config-dir /etc/openvpn/ccd
status /var/log/openvpn/status.log
verb 3

You have to comment ## push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp" and add specific traffic sub net you want to pass through this VPN server like

push  "route 10.2.2.100 255.255.255.255" ## some internet server
push  "route 54.201.1.19 255.255.255.255" ##example.com

after saving this configuration file now you can restart OPENVPN service

systemctl restart [email protected]