Headscale: Self-Hosting Tailscale's Control Plane

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:20:00 +0000

Tailscale’s pitch has always been that the hard part of a mesh VPN — key exchange, NAT traversal, relay fallback — is handled by a coordination server you never have to think about. I’ve written before about what Tailscale actually is and why that model is such a relief after a decade of hand-rolled WireGuard configs. The catch is that “you never have to think about it” also means “someone else’s infrastructure is a required dependency of your home network,” which sits uneasily on a site that otherwise argues for self-hosting everything it reasonably can. Headscale is the answer: an open-source, largely API-compatible reimplementation of Tailscale’s control plane that you run yourself. The clients don’t change at all — you point the standard Tailscale app at your own server instead of login.tailscale.com, and everything else about the mesh behaves the same.

Headscale - vo.rs

Headscale: Self-Hosting Tailscale's Control Plane