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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

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11–20 of 132 posts

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#11
This looks awesome. I am using Twingate (hosted and paid) currently in my production AWS VPC. AWS instance are in private subnets, no public ips attached, using a NAT instance for outbound internet, but very curious to try running Pangolin.

Can Pangolin also provide public access (currently I'm using Caddy as a reverse proxy)?

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#12
Everyone on /r/homelab has been talking about it over the last few months. I bought a VPS and later realized a cheap tiny PC would be better for my use case combined with Proxmox. The next step is configuring a few more services and installing Pangolin on the VPS for easy reverse proxy management. I haven’t used it yet but all in all it looks awesome and the reviews I’ve seen are overwhelmingly positive. Thank you for building it!

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find lacking in the web interface?

Sounds a bit nitpicky now that I put it into words but most of my usage is just on the public hostnames panel which is about 3-4 levels deep from the dashboard. There is also a UI disconnect between this and the DNS records screen I do this flow a number of times and the TUI I made solved this specific problem for me https://github.com/justingosan/tunnelman?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Yes, this exactly - I wouldn't call it nitpicky, it is really buried in there. I understand Cloudflare has a ton of other products and features, but the discoverability for CF Tunnels really could be better.

Just checked and it's:

Dashboard home > Zero Trust > Networks > Tunnels > [tunnel] > Public Hostname

And if it ends up provisioning a new DNS record, I always have to remember to go back to the domain's DNS screen and label it with the tunnel.

In general I use a tiny silver of Cloudflare's capabilities; it would be nice if the primary dashboard could bubble up the parts that I do use.

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#15

Does this work well behind Docker Swarm or is it not designed for that?

Yes I think so. I know it works quiet well in compose but as you scale to swarm I am not sure if there would be pains. You can just pop the connector into your compose stack and it will connect to anything in the docker network which we personally do to host some of our basic infrastructure.

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#16
post #5

This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that... so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on som…

I use CF tunnels pretty extensively with my home unraid server.

The TL;DR is this - there are certain apps I host that I want to be public and don't want to onboard a Tailscale node (for example my sister uses my Plex server). So, instead of setting up a reverse proxy, I simply create a subdomain in DNS (via CF) and then route that subdomain to the CF tunnel.

It's like 3 form entries to do all of this for one site/service and automatically creates an SSL cert for me. I love it.

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#17
post #5

This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that... so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on som…

Thanks! I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be…

I’m using an nginxproxymanager as reverse proxy and ssl terminus for exactly that, Immich, home assistant, etc. What would I gain from your solution?

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be…

I’m using an nginxproxymanager as reverse proxy and ssl terminus for exactly that, Immich, home assistant, etc. What would I gain from your solution?

I think if that works for you then stick with it! Pangolin would mostly do the same thing. I think if you wanted more auth control like users and pin codes and OIDC and roles you might not get that with NPM out of the box but could add on.

Pangolin has a tunnel component to it so if you were challenged on the ISP front you can put this on the VPS and it just makes configuring the connection back to the network easier so you don't need to set up WG back etc... It wraps it all up nicely in a UI and simple install script. It can also all be automated with the API if you are into that kind of thing.

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#19

This looks awesome. I am using Twingate (hosted and paid) currently in my production AWS VPC. AWS instance are in private subnets, no public ips attached, using a NAT instance for outbound internet, but very curious to try running Pangolin. Can Pangolin also provide public access (currently I'm using Caddy as a reverse proxy)?

Yes! Thats where it excels I think. If you want public authenticated access for your users and / or need that tunneling component to get into your network or a set of distributed networks then Pangolin is your animal!

Re: Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

#20
post #16
post #5

This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that... so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on som…

I use CF tunnels pretty extensively with my home unraid server. The TL;DR is this - there are certain apps I host that I want to be public and don't want to onboard a Tailscale node (for example my sister uses my Plex server). So, instead of setting up a reverse proxy, I simply create a subdomain in DNS (via CF) and then route that subdomain to the CF tunnel. It's like 3 form entries to do all of this for one site/se…

Out of curiosity why not give your sister restricted access to your tailnet instead? Then nothing is public.
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