A hands-on account of switching from Tailscale to Pangolin for remote home lab access. Pangolin is a self-hosted, identity-aware reverse proxy and tunneling solution that runs on a VPS, using WireGuard to tunnel back to a home network. The setup took under an hour using a single curl installer that generates a Docker Compose stack with Traefik, Gerbil, and a management UI. Key advantages over Tailscale include custom domain URLs, built-in per-service authentication (passwords, TOTP, OIDC), and no requirement for family members to install a VPN client. The main trade-off is losing Tailscale's exit node functionality for routing traffic through a home IP. The author still runs both tools in parallel while migrating DNS records.
Table of contents
Pangolin picks up where Tailscale left offA VPS, a domain, and a containerEverything behind a login, on my own domainWhat you lose, and why I stayed907 Impressions