For a long time, people have been telling me how amazing Tailscale is.
Looking at it, Tailscale is a mesh VPN service that allows you to connect your devices securely.
You can think of it like Hamachi of old, but with a focus on security and privacy, and most importantly to me: it's plug-and-play and compatible with a range of devices.
I use Tailscale to connect my devices securely, and I've been using it for a while now. It's a great service, and I highly recommend it, and we're even starting to use it at Vetspire for authenticated remote access!
Tailscale Serve
One of the features of Tailscale is the ability to expose services on your devices to the internet securely. This is done through the
tailscale serve command.
To use
tailscale serve, you need to have Tailscale installed on your device and be connected to the Tailscale network.
Once this is done, you can run the following command to expose a service on your device:
tailscale serve 8080
This will expose the service running on port
8080 on your device to your tailnet. You can then access this service using the URL provided by Tailscale.
This is surprisingly easy to use and works really well. I've used it to develop the mobile version of this blog, and it's been a great help.
Things pretty much just work, including live reloading, which is a huge win in productivity for me over just using responsive design mode in the browser.
Tailscale Funnel
Another feature of Tailscale is the ability to create a "funnel".
You can think about funnels like if
tailscale serve exposed your service to the wider internet instead of your tailnet.
This is done through the
tailscale funnel command:
tailscale funnel 8080
This requires some configuration via the Tailnet admin console, but once set up, it's a great way to expose services to the internet securely.
We've used this lots at Vetspire to help developers test and debug websocket related issues against our production backends while still keeping everything secure.
Conclusion
Tailscale is a great service, and I highly recommend it. It's easy to use, secure, and works well with a range of devices.
Check it out!