ts-proxy

Simple proxy program to allow exposing individual services to a Tailnet, and even to the Internet using Tailscale Funnel.

Unfortunately, the Tailscale daemon only allows exposing services using the current node domain, and you can't spawn (so far) nodes for services. With this you can!

On first run for one service, you will have to authenticate the service using your Tailscale account. The authentication can be either done passing an authentication token through the TS_AUTHKEY environment or by reading the startup logs until you find the authentication link. After authentication, Tailscale will store the certificates and credentials to the location specified by the -s flag so subsequent runs will not require reauthentication and up-to-date authorization tokens.

As the main build of Tailscale, you can get information about the user accessing the service using the following headers that get forwarded to the upstream service:

• Tailscale-User-Login
• Tailscale-User-Name
• Tailscale-User-Profile-Pic

And yeah, you can use Tailscale as a single sign on and have a public facing version! It's as safe and stable as tclip is because this proxy uses the exact same primitives.

Warning

You can count on the headers sent by ts-proxy as long as you follow the following conditions:

• Anything that changes the headers name representation such as Apache with PHP could be cheated by passing the header TAILSCALE_USER_LOGIN, for example.

• If some users can access your actual service directly without passing the traffic through ts-proxy they can change all the headers they want, including authentication ones.

• If you don't use the header authentication for anything in a given service these issues will not be a problem for that service.

Usage

Usage of ./ts-proxyd:
  -addr string
    	Port to listen (default ":443")
  -f	Enable tailscale funnel
  -h string
    	Where to forward the connection
  -n string
    	Hostname in tailscale devices list
  -s string
    	State directory

Release schedule

Version structure example: 0.7.10

• 0: major
• 7: minor
• 10: patch

Each week an automatic PR is sent to update the package dependencies. For each update there will be a patch release.

Bug fixes would be shipped in patch releases.

Anything that has breaking changes by changing something in this repository will be released as a minor release.

No plans for bumping the major versions yet.

Next steps

• A way to expose a folder, maybe using single page application patterns, instead of only ports.
• Experiments around exposing many nodes using only one process and a TOML, or YAML, config file.