A simple Go program that creates an ephemeral Tailscale node and forwards traffic from a Tailscale IP/hostname to a local service port. Several other solutions are available for dockerized seriveces, but I didn't use dockerized services, and needed a reason to start learning Golang :)

• Go 1.23 or later
• A Tailscale account
• Tailscale oauth client ID and secret
• Tailscale Tailnet name (via "DNS" section of the Admin panel)

go build -ldflags "-s -w" -trimpath -o tsrouter

or:

go install github.com/whitehawk2/tsrouter

1. Set your Tailscale variables (TS_CLIENT_ID, TS_CLIENT_ID, TS_TAILNET) as either environment variables, or in an .env file.

2. Run the program:

./tsrouter --hostname myservice --target-port 8080

• --hostname: Required. The desired Tailscale hostname for this service (will be available as hostname.your-tailnet.ts.net)
• --target-port: Required. The local port to forward traffic to
• --log-level: Optional. Set logging level (error, info, debug). Defaults to "info"

Forward traffic to a local web service running on port 8080:

./tsrouter --hostname webui --target-port 8080

Forward traffic to Vaultwarden with debug logging:

./tsrouter --hostname vault --target-port 45455 --log-level debug

• The program creates an ephemeral Tailscale node that will be automatically removed some time after going offline
• Multiple instances can run simultaneously to serve different services
• The service will be available across your Tailnet at hostname.your-tailnet.ts.net
• All traffic is forwarded over HTTPS (port 443) - first time will take a bit more time as tailscale provisions a Let's Encrypt Cert

This is my 1st project in Go, so there are a lot of improvements I want to make, and some that I don't even know I need to make.

Some general improvements etc are listed in main.go file, but higher level, I'd like to:

• Support dockerized version
• add CI/CD via Github Actions
• ...That will also build the app
• ... And maybe push it to some repo :)
• Nix + nix flake support :)
• MORE TO COME

In my real life I'm a DevOps engineer that just wants to learn Golang, so fun factor and "ooh, this seems interesting" would probably play a role in where does this project go.

Yeah do whatever you want with this, I bear no responsability etc. Mentioning this repo or my name in some form in your derivitive work will be nice, but eh.