An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

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Note: Always select the same GitHub tag as the released version you use to ensure you have the correct example configuration and documentation. The main branch might contain unreleased changes.

What is Tailscale

Tailscale is a modern VPN built on top of Wireguard. It works like an overlay network between the computers of your networks - using NAT traversal.

Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.

The control server works as an exchange point of Wireguard public keys for the nodes in the Tailscale network. It assigns the IP addresses of the clients, creates the boundaries between each user, enables sharing machines between users, and exposes the advertised routes of your nodes.

A Tailscale network (tailnet) is private network which Tailscale assigns to a user in terms of private users or an organisation.

Design goal

headscale aims to implement a self-hosted, open source alternative to the Tailscale control server. headscale has a narrower scope and an instance of headscale implements a single Tailnet, which is typically what a single organisation, or home/personal setup would use.

headscale uses terms that maps to Tailscale's control server, consult the glossary for explainations.

Support

If you like headscale and find it useful, there is a sponsorship and donation buttons available in the repo.

If you would like to sponsor features, bugs or prioritisation, reach out to one of the maintainers.

Features

• Full "base" support of Tailscale's features
• Configurable DNS
  • Split DNS
• Node registration
  • Single-Sign-On (via Open ID Connect)
  • Pre authenticated key
• Taildrop (File Sharing)
• Access control lists
• MagicDNS
• Support for multiple IP ranges in the tailnet
• Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6)
• Routing advertising (including exit nodes)
• Ephemeral nodes
• Embedded DERP server

Client OS support

Running headscale

Please have a look at the documentation under docs/.

Graphical Control Panels

Headscale provides an API for complete management of your Tailnet. These are community projects not directly affiliated with the Headscale project.

Talks

• Fosdem 2023 (video): Headscale: How we are using integration testing to reimplement Tailscale
  • presented by Juan Font Alonso and Kristoffer Dalby

Disclaimer

1. We have nothing to do with Tailscale, or Tailscale Inc.
2. The purpose of Headscale is maintaining a working, self-hosted Tailscale control panel.

Contributing

To contribute to headscale you would need the lastest version of Go and Buf(Protobuf generator).

We recommend using Nix to setup a development environment. This can be done with nix develop, which will install the tools and give you a shell. This guarantees that you will have the same dev env as headscale maintainers.

PRs and suggestions are welcome.

Code style

To ensure we have some consistency with a growing number of contributions, this project has adopted linting and style/formatting rules:

The Go code is linted with golangci-lint and formatted with golines (width 88) and gofumpt. Please configure your editor to run the tools while developing and make sure to run make lint and make fmt before committing any code.

The Proto code is linted with buf and formatted with clang-format.

The rest (Markdown, YAML, etc) is formatted with prettier.

Check out the .golangci.yaml and Makefile to see the specific configuration.

Install development tools

• Go
• Buf
• Protobuf tools

Install and activate:

nix develop

Testing and building

Some parts of the project require the generation of Go code from Protobuf (if changes are made in proto/) and it must be (re-)generated with:

make generate

Note: Please check in changes from gen/ in a separate commit to make it easier to review.

To run the tests:

make test

To build the program:

nix build

or

make build

Contributors

Kristoffer Dalby	Juan Font	Ward Vandewege	Jiang Zhu	Benjamin Roberts	Nico
Even Holthe	e-zk	Justin Angel	Alessandro (Ale) Segala	unreality	Moritz Poldrack
ohdearaugustin	Andriy Kushnir	Adrien Raffin-Caboisse	GrigoriyMikhalkin	Christian Heusel	Mike Lloyd
Anton Schubert	Niek van der Maas	Eugen Biegler	Azz	Aaron Bieber	Igor Perepilitsyn
Laurent Marchaud	Stefan Majer	Fernando De Lucchi	Orville Q. Song	hdhoang	bravechamp
Deon Thomas	Jamie Greeff	ChibangLW	Mevan Samaratunga	Michael G.	Paul Tötterman
Samuel Lock	Gonçalo Rodrigues	kevinlin	Snack	Artem Klevtsov	Casey Marshall
dbevacqua	Josh Taylor	LiuHanCheng	Motiejus Jakštys	Pavlos Vinieratos	Silver Bullet
Steven Honson	Victor Freire	thomas	Sean Reifschneider	Abraham Ingersoll	Albert Copeland
Andrei Pechkurov	Anoop Sundaresh	Antoine POPINEAU	Antonio Fernandez	Aofei Sheng	Arnar
Arthur Woimbée	Avirut Mehta	Bryan Stenson	Carson Yang	Darrell Kundel	fatih-acar
Felix Kronlage-Dammers	Felix Yan	Gabe Cook	JJGadgets	hrtkpf	Jim Tittsler
Johan Siebens	John Axel Eriksson	Jonathan de Jong	Julien Zweverink	Kurnia D Win	Marc
Maxim Gajdaj	Michael Savage	Pierre Carru	Pontus N	Rasmus Moorats	rcursaru
Mend Renovate	Ryan Fowler	Shaanan Cohney	Stefan VanBuren	sophware	Tanner
Teteros	The Gitter Badger	Tianon Gravi	Till Hoffmann	Tjerk Woudsma	Yang Bin
Yujie Xia	Zachary Newell	Zakhar Bessarab	Zhiyuan Zheng	Ziyuan Han	caelansar
derelm	dnaq	henning mueller	ignoramous	jimyag	suhelen
sharkonet	ma6174	manju-rn	nicholas-yap	Tommi Pernila	phpmalik
Wakeful-Cloud	zy	Àlex Torregrosa