Hi fellow homelabbers! I hope your day / night is going great.
Just stubled across this self-hosted cloudflare tunnel alternernative called Pangolin.
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Does anyone use it for exposing their homelab? It looks awesome, but I’ve never heard of it before.
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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.)
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Does anyone know of alternatives pieces or stacks or software that achieve the same without relying on cloudflare?
Your insights are highly appreciated!
Pangolin is my next homelab project. I can’t wait to give it a go. If anyone has any advise or guides it’d be appreciated
I don’t know of alternatives
Pangolin, while u.s. based does not appear to serve the state of its interests
I am not aware of a direct peer, but tailscale, a bastion hosting a direct VPN or remote reverse proxy to your homelab are all similar. Pangolin seemingly combines the best and more of these scenarios
Lawerence systems has a recent video that is pretty indepth.
I just switched from cloudflare to pangolin on a racknerd vps. I’m really liking it so far. Very easy to configure. I’ve got three different domains, and a ton of subdomains pointing to different services running on two servers on my lan. I’m loving the authentication, crowdsec, and geoblock features. The community guide for the metrics broke my system (and I didn’t backup any of the yaml files) but I was able to wipe everything and get it up again in about 30 minutes. I have my jellyfin bypassing the pangolin authentication for a few specific IPs so that my relatives can stream to their firesticks. I highly recommend it.
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 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.
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.
Pangolin is the most user friendly self hosted alternative to Cloudflare tunnels. There are dozens alternatives, but none with that feature set and such a UI.
Thanks for the list! Do you use Pangolin yourself?
No, since at the moment it wants to manage certificates, but I don’t intend to run pangolin as my main reverse proxy.
Using it for several weeks now. Very happy with it, especially now that it is integrated with OAuth, so SSO for getting through Pangolin itself and then on all the services it routes to.
That sounds awesome! No issues at all so far?
Using pangolin to serve a bunch of services from my homelab. It’s great.
