Hello Eveyone, this is the other maintainer here. Just wanted to add some more detail about the other components of this system:
Pangolin uses Traefik under the hood to do the actual HTTP proxying. A plugin, Badger, provides a way to authenticate every request with Pangolin. A second service, Gerbil, provides a WireGuard management server that Pangolin can use to create peers for connectivity. And finally, there is Newt, a CLI tool and Docker container that connects back to Gerbil with WireGuard fully in user space and proxies your local resources. This means that you do not need to run a privileged process or container in order to expose your services!
Newt ( https://github.com/fosrl/newt ) is a custom userspace Wireguard client that you run on the 'edge server' side (typically behind your home firewall) that is part of the Pangolin system. It reaches out to your Pangolin server (typically hosted on a small VPS with a static IP) and will take care of negotiating the Wireguard tunnel and managing dispatch to the different services you exposed and mapped on your LAN. Easiest way to understand the full stack is to have a look at https://docs.fossorial.io/Getting%20Started/overview wich includes a nice System Overview Diagram.
I’m using it as my ingress controller on my K3S homelab and it has definitely been a nice DX so far.
The one thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do with it is do compression (gzip/br/zstd) there, so I’m handling it in the application layer, which feels suboptimal.
Any tips? Seems like a table stakes sort of feature in the space that shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
Are you trying to compress the request that has already come in to your cluster? I'm not sure there's a ton of value to be extracted there, since the requests have already made their way across the internet uncompressed to your ingress point.
If there's a "long way" to go after hitting your ingress controller then maybe there's something to be gained...
This is super exciting! The “Cloudflare Tunnel” lock-in has always bugged me, so seeing an open source option is genuinely refreshing. I’m especially curious how Pangolin handles the gritty stuff—flaky networks, authentication headaches, scaling up when things get real. If anyone’s kicked the tires on this in the wild, how does it compare to the “it just works” magic of Cloudflare? Bonus points if you’ve wrangled it into playing nice with self-hosted stuff on a home connection. For context, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi running my blog and a bunch of other hobby projects from home, so real-world stories would be gold.
This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that...
so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on some particular device, like, a single EC2 instance, or my laptop that's at home while I'm out on my phone. Could you explain in layman's terms what this solves that e.g. tailscale doesn't?
I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be a good tool to use. Does that make sense?
I think if that works for you then stick with it! Pangolin would mostly do the same thing. I think if you wanted more auth control like users and pin codes and OIDC and roles you might not get that with NPM out of the box but could add on.
Pangolin has a tunnel component to it so if you were challenged on the ISP front you can put this on the VPS and it just makes configuring the connection back to the network easier so you don't need to set up WG back etc... It wraps it all up nicely in a UI and simple install script. It can also all be automated with the API if you are into that kind of thing.
I use CF tunnels pretty extensively with my home unraid server.
The TL;DR is this - there are certain apps I host that I want to be public and don't want to onboard a Tailscale node (for example my sister uses my Plex server). So, instead of setting up a reverse proxy, I simply create a subdomain in DNS (via CF) and then route that subdomain to the CF tunnel.
It's like 3 form entries to do all of this for one site/service and automatically creates an SSL cert for me. I love it.
Tailscale and Plex do not play nicely, particularly since Plex implemented a bunch of shit to try to charge users for accessing their own files outside what it considers a local network. Switching to Jellyfin is on my maintenance list. It's very understandable that if you had given a family member access to your Plex server before this year and it "just worked" you might look now at Tailscale as a way to put them on your LAN and then decide that the complexity isn't worth it, given the hoops that Plex had apparently gone through to make that a non-viable option.
Fuck Plex, by the way. Good on them for building up and turning themselves into a streaming service of sorts. Add value and I'll pay for it. But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files? Seriously, they can go to hell. No one streaming movie files to their family is doing so because they love paying middle-men, by the way. And no core function of Plex can't be done freely.
Tailscale (and headscale) is great for internal access to something that night not have public internet access. Others have mentioned an example of keeping a NAS off the public internet.
Cloudflare tunnels help expose a service to the internet with a bit more protection.
I have seen folks use both tailscale to access the backend and the public side is only Cloudflare tunnels.
It’s not unreasonable to point Cloudflare tunnels to a central and internal nginx proxy manager.
Tailscale can route the public internet into your services too can do this too but the protections in Cloudflare are likely a little more robust.
Panagolin looks interesting enough to try out, it could sit run behind Cloudflare tunnels while testing and then moved out.
But pangolin seems to be similar to that setup with a good UI, and more control. Definitely trying it out.
Quick question: Can it handle multiple domain names? I point multiple domain to the vps hosting my npm it proxy's them from there. Does Pangolin, also support multiple domains pointing to it?
My homelab has a setup like this, but all done somewhat-manually. HTTPS for my Docker images running in the homelab via a certbot image. A Wireguard setup to connect the homelab to a small Hetzner VPS, and a proxy there to allow certain traffic through.
I've been wanting to add some authentication lately so that I can manage access to the homelab resources. I currently prohibit all traffic and only allow the Wireguard subnet, but this means any clients have to be provisioned in Wireguard, which is a nuisance to setup manually. It does seem to work well enough though.
Pangolin seems like it would be a one-stop replacement and simplify the setup, especially once I look at adding user management to the mix.
Would love to understand it better too. It looks like the use cases are similar but the tech is different. NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale that uses Wireguard under the hood while these seem to use Traefik under the hood.
Let’s say my server is running on a VPN and gets new IP once in a while. Would Pangolin be an option to publicly expose my services? Because I have this challenge now where I am currently ”forced” to expose my public IP to share some services. I use firewall rules to allow incoming traffic to my server and Traefik to route the user to the right service. I just don’t like the feeling of being exposed publicly like this.
You need a publicly routable address in the mix. You would need a way of knowing that address.
I have that same feeling with the self hosting I do. To alleviate the small amount of stress it would bring me I rent a VPS that’s public on the internet. I configure a persistent keep alive, on the client I run locally to keep a connection to the server open, no port forwarding needed.
Cloudflare tunnels is such a poorly built product. The bar for quality is very low in this category. I struggled to make it work on an dell laptop running ubuntu, over wifi. It worked when I set it up at my home and then failed when it was deployed in the field. I literally had the experience of "well, it worked at my home, let's ship it!". I couldn't recover from the errors, either.
So, if you built something that is resilient enough to handle change in IP addresses, you've beaten CF tunnels.
Also interested in knowing whether a professional security audit was done and if there is a public security pentesting program. This is especially important given the blast radius of an authentication service.
Sorry if this is a noobish question, but would this allow me to access services on a VPS, that I do not want publicly accessible on the internet?
In other words: Let's say I have a VPS with eg. Keycloak running on it. I want to be able to access it for management purposes but don't want it exposed to other people on the internet. Would Pangolin be a way for me to do this?
Don't you use Keycloak for SSO? The ports needed for that needs to be accessible so services can talk to it. If there's a dedicated port for management you can still use it with software like pangolin. Run the management service on only a local port and access using this software or wireguad.
I use authentik and as far as I know the management is on the same web port so I have to allow some paths to be accessible to the world.
I'm not using anything YET. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety database I am developing on a VPS for public use. I want to use Keycloak for authentication and also some other services alongside (eg. a headless CMS for writing some of the content).
The thing is, I don't have any prior experience with hosting at all. So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...
> So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...
The answer to this is YES. Of course there are a variety of ways to implement. In your case I would start simple with something like wireguard. Keycloak won't be easy to install and configure as a beginner. If your needs are simple, check out https://github.com/lldap/lldap for authentication (and user management).
I guess you have to use firewall as well. So basically you block any access from internet except VPN service. And you can have rule which IP allowed to access your VPN service.
I did not consider it yet, I will look into it. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety databse that I am developing, but I have 0 experience with hosting software, so I am a bit wary about what I will be exposing...
I have set up something similar just recently with an OPNSense box running DNS, the WireGuard instance and getting a wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that it pushes to my Synology reverse proxy (Nginx). So from my clients I can enable the WG tunnel only on my internal IP range, setting the internal DNS, so I don't have to have my public cert pointing to my IP. It works once setup for my home net. But for multi-site, Pangolin looks very polished and probably easier to set up.
Is Newt a custom implementation of a WireGuard server? Has it been security audited in some way?
Everyone on /r/homelab has been talking about it over the last few months. I bought a VPS and later realized a cheap tiny PC would be better for my use case combined with Proxmox. The next step is configuring a few more services and installing Pangolin on the VPS for easy reverse proxy management. I haven’t used it yet but all in all it looks awesome and the reviews I’ve seen are overwhelmingly positive. Thank you for building it!
Did you get outside contributions yet?
I'm asking because it is dual licensed agpl and commercial (just like a recent project I'm working on), and am wondering how contributors react to the cla.
Btw I like your short and clear CLA!
Did you check the wording of the cla with a lawyer? In my project I wanted to replace the perpetual license granted by contributors by 'a license granted as long as the software is also proposed under the agpl', but that might make it too complicated to still keep it succinct and legally clear.
I have been using pangolin for a few months already and it's awesome.
Installed in a small VPS (static IP) as an entry point for all the services I want to expose to friends and family from my homelab (dynamic IP), completely secure and very easy to manage.
If you use this, it makes sense to run it at home. If you run it on a VPS, traffic is decrypted on VPS, the same privacy issue with Cloudflare tunnels. You have to trust the VPS provider.
This is true! But you have a little more control over who you might choose to trust. For example - you might trust AWS not to snoop in your VM more than you might trust CF to not collect valuable usage data about you when they decrypt your traffic.
Agreed - there’s a big difference between “I actively asked CF to terminate my TLS” and “I suspect my provider is scraping unencrypted data out of my running VM”
I doubt there is less monitoring at a VPS than CF. Many VPS companies are less known and smaller, and may not have professional audit and access processes in place.
genuine, security newbie, question.
What's the worst case scenario that can happen on using this type of solution from a security standpoint? I do get it the authentication would be compromised. Probably some internal ports would be exposed publicly too.. what else?
Yes I think so. I know it works quiet well in compose but as you scale to swarm I am not sure if there would be pains. You can just pop the connector into your compose stack and it will connect to anything in the docker network which we personally do to host some of our basic infrastructure.
This looks awesome. I am using Twingate (hosted and paid) currently in my production AWS VPC. AWS instance are in private subnets, no public ips attached, using a NAT instance for outbound internet, but very curious to try running Pangolin.
Can Pangolin also provide public access (currently I'm using Caddy as a reverse proxy)?
Yes! Thats where it excels I think. If you want public authenticated access for your users and / or need that tunneling component to get into your network or a set of distributed networks then Pangolin is your animal!
I wish I'd found this project sooner. UI looks quite sleek!
I love working with CF Tunnels but I got frustrated with their lackluster web admin ux that I recently decided to have Claude whip up a quick terminal interface for it
Sounds a bit nitpicky now that I put it into words but most of my usage is just on the public hostnames panel which is about 3-4 levels deep from the dashboard. There is also a UI disconnect between this and the DNS records screen
Yes, this exactly - I wouldn't call it nitpicky, it is really buried in there. I understand Cloudflare has a ton of other products and features, but the discoverability for CF Tunnels really could be better.
Just checked and it's:
Dashboard home > Zero Trust > Networks > Tunnels > [tunnel] > Public Hostname
And if it ends up provisioning a new DNS record, I always have to remember to go back to the domain's DNS screen and label it with the tunnel.
In general I use a tiny silver of Cloudflare's capabilities; it would be nice if the primary dashboard could bubble up the parts that I do use.
Hello Eveyone, this is the other maintainer here. Just wanted to add some more detail about the other components of this system:
Pangolin uses Traefik under the hood to do the actual HTTP proxying. A plugin, Badger, provides a way to authenticate every request with Pangolin. A second service, Gerbil, provides a WireGuard management server that Pangolin can use to create peers for connectivity. And finally, there is Newt, a CLI tool and Docker container that connects back to Gerbil with WireGuard fully in user space and proxies your local resources. This means that you do not need to run a privileged process or container in order to expose your services!
Been using this for a few months for serving from home with a tiny VPS at Hetzner tunneling the traffic to Newt behind my home firewall.
My experience went very smooth and stable. The one issue I thought I had turned out to be not related to Pangolin at all.
https://github.com/orgs/fosrl/discussions/950
What's Newt?
Newt ( https://github.com/fosrl/newt ) is a custom userspace Wireguard client that you run on the 'edge server' side (typically behind your home firewall) that is part of the Pangolin system. It reaches out to your Pangolin server (typically hosted on a small VPS with a static IP) and will take care of negotiating the Wireguard tunnel and managing dispatch to the different services you exposed and mapped on your LAN. Easiest way to understand the full stack is to have a look at https://docs.fossorial.io/Getting%20Started/overview wich includes a nice System Overview Diagram.
> Pangolin uses Traefik under the hood to do the actual HTTP proxying.
Traefik is awesome, and one of the biggest reasons is it's extensibility and robustness.
It absolutely does not get enough attention!
I’m using it as my ingress controller on my K3S homelab and it has definitely been a nice DX so far.
The one thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do with it is do compression (gzip/br/zstd) there, so I’m handling it in the application layer, which feels suboptimal.
Any tips? Seems like a table stakes sort of feature in the space that shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
Did the compress middleware not work for you?
https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/middlewares/http/compress/
Are you trying to compress the request that has already come in to your cluster? I'm not sure there's a ton of value to be extracted there, since the requests have already made their way across the internet uncompressed to your ingress point.
If there's a "long way" to go after hitting your ingress controller then maybe there's something to be gained...
Would be nice if there were a mini-tutorial in the doc for each of the use-cases you mention here, so we could quickly test it and see if it helps
This is super exciting! The “Cloudflare Tunnel” lock-in has always bugged me, so seeing an open source option is genuinely refreshing. I’m especially curious how Pangolin handles the gritty stuff—flaky networks, authentication headaches, scaling up when things get real. If anyone’s kicked the tires on this in the wild, how does it compare to the “it just works” magic of Cloudflare? Bonus points if you’ve wrangled it into playing nice with self-hosted stuff on a home connection. For context, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi running my blog and a bunch of other hobby projects from home, so real-world stories would be gold.
This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that...
so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on some particular device, like, a single EC2 instance, or my laptop that's at home while I'm out on my phone. Could you explain in layman's terms what this solves that e.g. tailscale doesn't?
Thanks!
I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be a good tool to use. Does that make sense?
I’m using an nginxproxymanager as reverse proxy and ssl terminus for exactly that, Immich, home assistant, etc. What would I gain from your solution?
I think if that works for you then stick with it! Pangolin would mostly do the same thing. I think if you wanted more auth control like users and pin codes and OIDC and roles you might not get that with NPM out of the box but could add on.
Pangolin has a tunnel component to it so if you were challenged on the ISP front you can put this on the VPS and it just makes configuring the connection back to the network easier so you don't need to set up WG back etc... It wraps it all up nicely in a UI and simple install script. It can also all be automated with the API if you are into that kind of thing.
That makes a ton of sense actually! I'm excited to give it a try!
I use CF tunnels pretty extensively with my home unraid server.
The TL;DR is this - there are certain apps I host that I want to be public and don't want to onboard a Tailscale node (for example my sister uses my Plex server). So, instead of setting up a reverse proxy, I simply create a subdomain in DNS (via CF) and then route that subdomain to the CF tunnel.
It's like 3 form entries to do all of this for one site/service and automatically creates an SSL cert for me. I love it.
Out of curiosity why not give your sister restricted access to your tailnet instead? Then nothing is public.
My guess is that teaching and convincing someone to install tailscale on every device they need access is a lot harder than sending a link.
Thats why i use pangolin.
Tailscale and Plex do not play nicely, particularly since Plex implemented a bunch of shit to try to charge users for accessing their own files outside what it considers a local network. Switching to Jellyfin is on my maintenance list. It's very understandable that if you had given a family member access to your Plex server before this year and it "just worked" you might look now at Tailscale as a way to put them on your LAN and then decide that the complexity isn't worth it, given the hoops that Plex had apparently gone through to make that a non-viable option.
Fuck Plex, by the way. Good on them for building up and turning themselves into a streaming service of sorts. Add value and I'll pay for it. But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files? Seriously, they can go to hell. No one streaming movie files to their family is doing so because they love paying middle-men, by the way. And no core function of Plex can't be done freely.
To me, another huge no-no is the apparent lack of option to stop Plex from sending all the filenames to the mothership.
Are you aware that serving media streams over the tunnel might be against the ToS? This is what kept me from using it tbh.
Tailscale (and headscale) is great for internal access to something that night not have public internet access. Others have mentioned an example of keeping a NAS off the public internet.
Cloudflare tunnels help expose a service to the internet with a bit more protection.
I have seen folks use both tailscale to access the backend and the public side is only Cloudflare tunnels.
It’s not unreasonable to point Cloudflare tunnels to a central and internal nginx proxy manager.
Tailscale can route the public internet into your services too can do this too but the protections in Cloudflare are likely a little more robust.
Panagolin looks interesting enough to try out, it could sit run behind Cloudflare tunnels while testing and then moved out.
There are dozens of open source alternatives to Cloudflare Tunnels: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
That being said, I believe Pangolin is one of the better and polished ones.
Amazing project. I have been using tail scale connected to an nginx proxy manager hosted on a VPS, to make my application public. Wrote about it here: https://hsps.in/post/how-i-host-public-apps-using-tailscale/
But pangolin seems to be similar to that setup with a good UI, and more control. Definitely trying it out.
Quick question: Can it handle multiple domain names? I point multiple domain to the vps hosting my npm it proxy's them from there. Does Pangolin, also support multiple domains pointing to it?
My homelab has a setup like this, but all done somewhat-manually. HTTPS for my Docker images running in the homelab via a certbot image. A Wireguard setup to connect the homelab to a small Hetzner VPS, and a proxy there to allow certain traffic through.
I've been wanting to add some authentication lately so that I can manage access to the homelab resources. I currently prohibit all traffic and only allow the Wireguard subnet, but this means any clients have to be provisioned in Wireguard, which is a nuisance to setup manually. It does seem to work well enough though.
Pangolin seems like it would be a one-stop replacement and simplify the setup, especially once I look at adding user management to the mix.
What is the difference between Pangolin and NetBird, which is also a self-hosted and fully open-source solution?
https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird
I believe netbird does not have all the features in the open source version. The one thing that was a show stopper for me was the SSO tax.
Would love to understand it better too. It looks like the use cases are similar but the tech is different. NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale that uses Wireguard under the hood while these seem to use Traefik under the hood.
I am personally a user of NetBird and love it.
The design of the UI is very similar though :)
Pangolin also uses WireGuard and does not lock features behind a paywall.
for now anyway
Let’s say my server is running on a VPN and gets new IP once in a while. Would Pangolin be an option to publicly expose my services? Because I have this challenge now where I am currently ”forced” to expose my public IP to share some services. I use firewall rules to allow incoming traffic to my server and Traefik to route the user to the right service. I just don’t like the feeling of being exposed publicly like this.
You need a publicly routable address in the mix. You would need a way of knowing that address.
I have that same feeling with the self hosting I do. To alleviate the small amount of stress it would bring me I rent a VPS that’s public on the internet. I configure a persistent keep alive, on the client I run locally to keep a connection to the server open, no port forwarding needed.
Cloudflare tunnels is such a poorly built product. The bar for quality is very low in this category. I struggled to make it work on an dell laptop running ubuntu, over wifi. It worked when I set it up at my home and then failed when it was deployed in the field. I literally had the experience of "well, it worked at my home, let's ship it!". I couldn't recover from the errors, either.
So, if you built something that is resilient enough to handle change in IP addresses, you've beaten CF tunnels.
Also interested in knowing whether a professional security audit was done and if there is a public security pentesting program. This is especially important given the blast radius of an authentication service.
Im sure if there was an audit, it would say so
Sorry if this is a noobish question, but would this allow me to access services on a VPS, that I do not want publicly accessible on the internet?
In other words: Let's say I have a VPS with eg. Keycloak running on it. I want to be able to access it for management purposes but don't want it exposed to other people on the internet. Would Pangolin be a way for me to do this?
Don't you use Keycloak for SSO? The ports needed for that needs to be accessible so services can talk to it. If there's a dedicated port for management you can still use it with software like pangolin. Run the management service on only a local port and access using this software or wireguad.
I use authentik and as far as I know the management is on the same web port so I have to allow some paths to be accessible to the world.
I'm not using anything YET. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety database I am developing on a VPS for public use. I want to use Keycloak for authentication and also some other services alongside (eg. a headless CMS for writing some of the content).
The thing is, I don't have any prior experience with hosting at all. So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...
> So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...
The answer to this is YES. Of course there are a variety of ways to implement. In your case I would start simple with something like wireguard. Keycloak won't be easy to install and configure as a beginner. If your needs are simple, check out https://github.com/lldap/lldap for authentication (and user management).
I guess you have to use firewall as well. So basically you block any access from internet except VPN service. And you can have rule which IP allowed to access your VPN service.
Did you already consider using ssh port forwarding? That way you can temporarily forward the local port that keycloak is running on to your machine
I did not consider it yet, I will look into it. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety databse that I am developing, but I have 0 experience with hosting software, so I am a bit wary about what I will be exposing...
You want Tailscale for that.
This looks really nice.
I have set up something similar just recently with an OPNSense box running DNS, the WireGuard instance and getting a wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that it pushes to my Synology reverse proxy (Nginx). So from my clients I can enable the WG tunnel only on my internal IP range, setting the internal DNS, so I don't have to have my public cert pointing to my IP. It works once setup for my home net. But for multi-site, Pangolin looks very polished and probably easier to set up.
Is Newt a custom implementation of a WireGuard server? Has it been security audited in some way?
EDIT: Sorry, I misread, Newt is the WireGuard client and is based on wireguard-go if I'm correct.
Is it called Pangolin because pangolin's have scale-y tails?
Everyone on /r/homelab has been talking about it over the last few months. I bought a VPS and later realized a cheap tiny PC would be better for my use case combined with Proxmox. The next step is configuring a few more services and installing Pangolin on the VPS for easy reverse proxy management. I haven’t used it yet but all in all it looks awesome and the reviews I’ve seen are overwhelmingly positive. Thank you for building it!
Did you get outside contributions yet? I'm asking because it is dual licensed agpl and commercial (just like a recent project I'm working on), and am wondering how contributors react to the cla.
Btw I like your short and clear CLA! Did you check the wording of the cla with a lawyer? In my project I wanted to replace the perpetual license granted by contributors by 'a license granted as long as the software is also proposed under the agpl', but that might make it too complicated to still keep it succinct and legally clear.
I have been using pangolin for a few months already and it's awesome. Installed in a small VPS (static IP) as an entry point for all the services I want to expose to friends and family from my homelab (dynamic IP), completely secure and very easy to manage.
If you use this, it makes sense to run it at home. If you run it on a VPS, traffic is decrypted on VPS, the same privacy issue with Cloudflare tunnels. You have to trust the VPS provider.
This is true! But you have a little more control over who you might choose to trust. For example - you might trust AWS not to snoop in your VM more than you might trust CF to not collect valuable usage data about you when they decrypt your traffic.
Agreed - there’s a big difference between “I actively asked CF to terminate my TLS” and “I suspect my provider is scraping unencrypted data out of my running VM”
I doubt there is less monitoring at a VPS than CF. Many VPS companies are less known and smaller, and may not have professional audit and access processes in place.
What can you even do if you can't trust a VPS provider?
TLS pass through. You simply route encrypted traffic to your home. The keys to the castle are all in home!
genuine, security newbie, question. What's the worst case scenario that can happen on using this type of solution from a security standpoint? I do get it the authentication would be compromised. Probably some internal ports would be exposed publicly too.. what else?
Thought this was Pangolin the laser control software, got excited there :(
How does this compare to other OSS like zrok?
Cloudflare tunnels do not work in certain countries (e.g.Russia), Pangolin does.
Does this work well behind Docker Swarm or is it not designed for that?
Yes I think so. I know it works quiet well in compose but as you scale to swarm I am not sure if there would be pains. You can just pop the connector into your compose stack and it will connect to anything in the docker network which we personally do to host some of our basic infrastructure.
Would Pangolin "integrate naturally" with something like Dokploy? Or is more meant to "replace" it?
Could you make a Dokploy template to let people deploy it easily?
"Easily expose services on IoT and edge devices for field monitoring"
can you give more details, would this be adapted to IoT devices running on MCUs like ESP32 etc?
Reverse proxy in nodejs? How about no?
This looks awesome. I am using Twingate (hosted and paid) currently in my production AWS VPC. AWS instance are in private subnets, no public ips attached, using a NAT instance for outbound internet, but very curious to try running Pangolin.
Can Pangolin also provide public access (currently I'm using Caddy as a reverse proxy)?
Yes! Thats where it excels I think. If you want public authenticated access for your users and / or need that tunneling component to get into your network or a set of distributed networks then Pangolin is your animal!
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I wish I'd found this project sooner. UI looks quite sleek!
I love working with CF Tunnels but I got frustrated with their lackluster web admin ux that I recently decided to have Claude whip up a quick terminal interface for it
You found it early enough. I guess it's not even 1 year old.
What do you find lacking in the web interface?
Sounds a bit nitpicky now that I put it into words but most of my usage is just on the public hostnames panel which is about 3-4 levels deep from the dashboard. There is also a UI disconnect between this and the DNS records screen
I do this flow a number of times and the TUI I made solved this specific problem for me https://github.com/justingosan/tunnelman?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Yes, this exactly - I wouldn't call it nitpicky, it is really buried in there. I understand Cloudflare has a ton of other products and features, but the discoverability for CF Tunnels really could be better.
Just checked and it's:
Dashboard home > Zero Trust > Networks > Tunnels > [tunnel] > Public Hostname
And if it ends up provisioning a new DNS record, I always have to remember to go back to the domain's DNS screen and label it with the tunnel.
In general I use a tiny silver of Cloudflare's capabilities; it would be nice if the primary dashboard could bubble up the parts that I do use.
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This is exactly what I have been looking for!
Thanks for building this. I’ll be trying it out when I get home tonight.