There's an "official" raspberry pi camera module with mature libraries already written, and I believe it comes in both a regular IR and a No-IR version for night-ish vision.
There are also a ton of different 3D-printable mounts and jigs for them on sites like thingiverse and instructables.
My favorite[1] comes as a kit with the jig, 3 servo motors, and an add-on board for a raspi. Using this I have a live-feed camera that can rotate up to 180 degress on 3 axis that I can control from anywhere in the world using my phone as long as my internet connection is up at home. All hosted locally, even the live feed frontend. It's not hard to build or set up either, took me a lazy day and I'm far from a good coder.
(i'm past the time in which I can edit my original post)
I remembered incorrectly, that PiMoroni kit does not include the 3 servo motors, you need to buy those separately along with the RPi camera module. Luckily the servos required are super common little blue servos that are all over eBay and such for dirt cheap.
OpenVPN yes. I have my router hosting the openvpn, but I think you could do that on the RPi as well. I can't say for _sure_, as I haven't tried it personally, but I think there's more than enough juice on an RPi to host all of that, especially if it's only ever going to handle 1 or 2 simultaneous connections.
There are also a ton of different 3D-printable mounts and jigs for them on sites like thingiverse and instructables.
My favorite[1] comes as a kit with the jig, 3 servo motors, and an add-on board for a raspi. Using this I have a live-feed camera that can rotate up to 180 degress on 3 axis that I can control from anywhere in the world using my phone as long as my internet connection is up at home. All hosted locally, even the live feed frontend. It's not hard to build or set up either, took me a lazy day and I'm far from a good coder.
1: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/...