tailgate

Tailgate

A SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT proxy that runs on your Tailscale network.

Overview

Tailgate is a small, single-binary proxy that joins your Tailscale tailnet via tsnet and accepts SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT connections. Unlike a Tailscale exit node which routes all of a device's traffic through another node, Tailgate lets you selectively route only the traffic you choose -- per app, browser, or command.

Why Tailgate?

• You want to route specific apps or browsers through your tailnet, not all traffic
• You can't (or don't want to) install the Tailscale daemon on the proxy host
• You need a proxy in a container, CI runner, or embedded device with no /dev/net/tun
• You want both SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT on one port with zero configuration

Features

• Automatic protocol detection -- serves both SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT on a single port
• Joins your tailnet via tsnet -- no Tailscale daemon required on the proxy host
• Idle tunnel teardown -- tunnels with no traffic in either direction are cleaned up automatically
• Graceful shutdown -- drains active connections on SIGINT/SIGTERM
• Hardened request parsing -- caps CONNECT header size, returns proper 4xx errors

Installation

go install github.com/kljensen/tailgate@latest

Or build from source (dependencies are vendored):

git clone https://github.com/kljensen/tailgate.git
cd tailgate
go build -mod vendor .

Usage

tailgate [flags]

Starting the proxy

tailgate -hostname my-proxy -verbose

On first run, tsnet will print a login URL. Visit it to authorize the node on your tailnet. State is saved to -state-dir (or a temp directory by default), so subsequent runs reconnect automatically.

For headless or automated deployments, set TS_AUTHKEY:

TS_AUTHKEY=tskey-auth-... tailgate -hostname my-proxy -state-dir /var/lib/tailgate

Generate auth keys at https://login.tailscale.com/admin/settings/keys. Use -state-dir for any persistent deployment so tsnet state survives reboots.

Proxying with curl

# Via SOCKS5 (socks5h resolves DNS through the proxy)
curl --proxy socks5h://my-proxy:1080 https://example.com

# Via HTTP CONNECT
curl --proxy http://my-proxy:1080 https://example.com

Environment variables

Many tools (curl, wget, git, python requests, etc.) respect the standard proxy environment variables:

export ALL_PROXY=socks5h://my-proxy:1080

# These then route through Tailgate
curl https://example.com
git clone https://github.com/user/repo.git
wget https://example.com/file.tar.gz

Browsers

Firefox has built-in proxy settings -- set the SOCKS Host to my-proxy, port 1080, SOCKS v5, and check "Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5" in Firefox. Chrome and Safari use your operating system's proxy settings. See the ArchWiki for a comprehensive reference.

How It Works

Tailgate listens on a single TCP port. When a connection arrives, it peeks at the first byte: 0x05 means SOCKS5, anything else is parsed as an HTTP CONNECT request (returning 400 if invalid). Both protocols establish a bidirectional tunnel to the target host. Each side of the tunnel is wrapped with an idle timeout so stale connections don't linger forever.

Security

Tailgate listens via tsnet.Listen, so only devices on your Tailscale network can connect. No proxy authentication is needed -- your tailnet is the trust boundary. Use Tailscale ACLs for finer-grained access control.

See Also

• wireproxy -- the same idea for WireGuard
• Tailscale userspace networking -- Tailscale's built-in SOCKS5 proxy (requires the full daemon)

License

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. See LICENSE for details.