2d ago

Any experience with Pangolin?

Hi fellow homelabbers! I hope your day / night is going great.

Just stubled across this self-hosted cloudflare tunnel alternernative called Pangolin.

Does anyone use it for exposing their homelab? It looks awesome, but I've never heard of it before.
Should I be reluctant since it's developed by a US-based company? I mean security-wise. (I'll remove this question if it's too political.)
Does anyone know of alternatives pieces or stacks or software that achieve the same without relying on cloudflare?

Your insights are highly appreciated!

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19 comments

I've seen lots of talk about headscale, an open source tailscale which allows you to create your own tailnet and I'm sure I've seen people talking about using tailscale as a reverse proxy tool, but it's not something I've explored in detail.
Pangolin is somewhat higher on my list of things to explore than headscale though.
If you're looking for a reverse proxy caddy and Traefik are also widely used.
With all of these solutions though you're going to need to have some online provider somewhere handling DNS for you so that you can have your domains be pointed to your IP address.
- I think Pangolin works a bit differently... Correct me if I'm wrong...
  Where headscale is a coordination server for a wireguard mesh, pangolin is a reverse proxy server that connects to the backend services via wireguard tunnels
  
  That's likely true.
  The first I heard of Pangolin was in a conversation that followed on from one about head/tailscale and I accept that I may have jumped to a conclusion. I am certain I've seen people talking about using it as a reverse proxy tool. Just found a blog post on the tailscale site talking about how to do it and they're using tailscale and caddy, rather than everything being handled by tailscale alone, so I'll accept that I'm wrong on this one. https://tailscale.com/blog/last-reverse-proxy-you-need
- I have yet to get headscale to work with my system. No turnkey setup, instructions that lack clarity, and in the end... idk how it's supposed to do the thing.
  
  Then you can just go with Tailscale, it’s 100% turnkey and just works. Even better when combined with NextDNS
  
  I did manage to get it to work, but I recall it took me a while. I have several devices connected to it now though. I'm keenly looking forward to the autogroup:self ACL support so I can set up sensible ACLs and share my net with some mates - I only have my own devices on it right now.
  Anything I can share that might help your understanding?
  
  Every system I can run headscale on I need to do it via an nginx reverse proxy
  
  Yes you need a way to expose it over https. A reverse proxy is easiest. I use Caddy.
- I love headscale. I use it for subnet routing. I have a server in the cloud with NGINX for reverse proxy and the a subnet router at home that just routes internal stuff so I just use the local IP for the backend service and it just works.

19 comments