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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

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

#41

Post by noduerme »

oschwartz10612 wrote: post #7
noduerme wrote: 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…

That makes a ton of sense actually! I'm excited to give it a try!

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

#43

Post by noduerme »

jonotime wrote: post #20
mbesto wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tailscale and Plex do not play nicely, particularly since Plex implemented a bunch of shit to try to charge users for accessing their own files outside what it considers a local network. Switching to Jellyfin is on my maintenance list. It's very understandable that if you had given a family member access to your Plex server before this year and it "just worked" you might look now at Tailscale as a way to put them on your LAN and then decide that the complexity isn't worth it, given the hoops that Plex had apparently gone through to make that a non-viable option.

Fuck Plex, by the way. Good on them for building up and turning themselves into a streaming service of sorts. Add value and I'll pay for it. But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files? Seriously, they can go to hell. No one streaming movie files to their family is doing so because they love paying middle-men, by the way. And no core function of Plex can't be done freely.

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

#44

Post by v5v3 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #24
oschwartz10612 wrote: post #2

Hello Eveyone, this is the other maintainer here. Just wanted to add some more detail about the other components of this system: Pangolin uses Traefik under the hood to do the actual HTTP proxying. A plugin, Badger, provides a way to authenticate every request with Pangolin. A second service, Gerbil, provides a WireGuard management server that Pangolin can use to create peers for connectivity. And finally, there is N…

Been using this for a few months for serving from home with a tiny VPS at Hetzner tunneling the traffic to Newt behind my home firewall. My experience went very smooth and stable. The one issue I thought I had turned out to be not related to Pangolin at all. https://github.com/orgs/fosrl/discussions/950

What's Newt?

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

#45

Post by resiros »

LucidLynx wrote: post #34

What is the difference between Pangolin and NetBird, which is also a self-hosted and fully open-source solution? https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

Would love to understand it better too. It looks like the use cases are similar but the tech is different. NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale that uses Wireguard under the hood while these seem to use Traefik under the hood.

I am personally a user of NetBird and love it.

The design of the UI is very similar though :)

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

#46

Post by mekster »

aborsy wrote: post #21

If you use this, it makes sense to run it at home. If you run it on a VPS, traffic is decrypted on VPS, the same privacy issue with Cloudflare tunnels. You have to trust the VPS provider.

What can you even do if you can't trust a VPS provider?

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

#47

Post by mekster »

jz10 wrote: post #4

I wish I'd found this project sooner. UI looks quite sleek! I love working with CF Tunnels but I got frustrated with their lackluster web admin ux that I recently decided to have Claude whip up a quick terminal interface for it

You found it early enough. I guess it's not even 1 year old.

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

#48

Post by PeterStuer »

v5v3 wrote: post #44
PeterStuer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using this for a few months for serving from home with a tiny VPS at Hetzner tunneling the traffic to Newt behind my home firewall. My experience went very smooth and stable. The one issue I thought I had turned out to be not related to Pangolin at all. https://github.com/orgs/fosrl/discussions/950

What's Newt?

Newt ( https://github.com/fosrl/newt ) is a custom userspace Wireguard client that you run on the 'edge server' side (typically behind your home firewall) that is part of the Pangolin system. It reaches out to your Pangolin server (typically hosted on a small VPS with a static IP) and will take care of negotiating the Wireguard tunnel and managing dispatch to the different services you exposed and mapped on your LAN. Easiest way to understand the full stack is to have a look at https://docs.fossorial.io/Getting%20Started/overview wich includes a nice System Overview Diagram.

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

#49

Post by dizhn »

LucidLynx wrote: post #34

What is the difference between Pangolin and NetBird, which is also a self-hosted and fully open-source solution? https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

I believe netbird does not have all the features in the open source version. The one thing that was a show stopper for me was the SSO tax.

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

#50

Post by scottgg »

fossorialowen wrote: post #22
aborsy wrote: post #21

If you use this, it makes sense to run it at home. If you run it on a VPS, traffic is decrypted on VPS, the same privacy issue with Cloudflare tunnels. You have to trust the VPS provider.

This is true! But you have a little more control over who you might choose to trust. For example - you might trust AWS not to snoop in your VM more than you might trust CF to not collect valuable usage data about you when they decrypt your traffic.

Agreed - there’s a big difference between “I actively asked CF to terminate my TLS” and “I suspect my provider is scraping unencrypted data out of my running VM”
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