Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels (github.com)

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 Newt, a CLI tool and Docker container that connects back to Gerbil with WireGuard fully in user space and proxies your local resources. This means that you do not need to run a privileged process or container in order to expose your services!

This is exactly what I have been looking for!

Thanks for building this. I’ll be trying it out when I get home tonight.

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

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 some particular device, like, a single EC2 instance, or my laptop that's at home while I'm out on my phone. Could you explain in layman's terms what this solves that e.g. tailscale doesn't?

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)?

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!

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

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.

I have been using pangolin for a few months already and it's awesome. Installed in a small VPS (static IP) as an entry point for all the services I want to expose to friends and family from my homelab (dynamic IP), completely secure and very easy to manage.

Amazing project. I have been using tail scale connected to an nginx proxy manager hosted on a VPS, to make my application public. Wrote about it here: https://hsps.in/post/how-i-host-public-apps-using-tailscale/

But pangolin seems to be similar to that setup with a good UI, and more control. Definitely trying it out.

Quick question: Can it handle multiple domain names? I point multiple domain to the vps hosting my npm it proxy's them from there. Does Pangolin, also support multiple domains pointing to it?

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Sorry if this is a noobish question, but would this allow me to access services on a VPS, that I do not want publicly accessible on the internet?

In other words: Let's say I have a VPS with eg. Keycloak running on it. I want to be able to access it for management purposes but don't want it exposed to other people on the internet. Would Pangolin be a way for me to do this?

"Easily expose services on IoT and edge devices for field monitoring"

can you give more details, would this be adapted to IoT devices running on MCUs like ESP32 etc?

Did you get outside contributions yet? I'm asking because it is dual licensed agpl and commercial (just like a recent project I'm working on), and am wondering how contributors react to the cla.

Btw I like your short and clear CLA! Did you check the wording of the cla with a lawyer? In my project I wanted to replace the perpetual license granted by contributors by 'a license granted as long as the software is also proposed under the agpl', but that might make it too complicated to still keep it succinct and legally clear.

Would Pangolin "integrate naturally" with something like Dokploy? Or is more meant to "replace" it?

Could you make a Dokploy template to let people deploy it easily?

What is the difference between Pangolin and NetBird, which is also a self-hosted and fully open-source solution?

https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

This is super exciting! The “Cloudflare Tunnel” lock-in has always bugged me, so seeing an open source option is genuinely refreshing. I’m especially curious how Pangolin handles the gritty stuff—flaky networks, authentication headaches, scaling up when things get real. If anyone’s kicked the tires on this in the wild, how does it compare to the “it just works” magic of Cloudflare? Bonus points if you’ve wrangled it into playing nice with self-hosted stuff on a home connection. For context, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi running my blog and a bunch of other hobby projects from home, so real-world stories would be gold.

There are dozens of open source alternatives to Cloudflare Tunnels: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

That being said, I believe Pangolin is one of the better and polished ones.

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Thought this was Pangolin the laser control software, got excited there :(

This looks really nice.

I have set up something similar just recently with an OPNSense box running DNS, the WireGuard instance and getting a wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that it pushes to my Synology reverse proxy (Nginx). So from my clients I can enable the WG tunnel only on my internal IP range, setting the internal DNS, so I don't have to have my public cert pointing to my IP. It works once setup for my home net. But for multi-site, Pangolin looks very polished and probably easier to set up.

Is Newt a custom implementation of a WireGuard server? Has it been security audited in some way?

Also interested in knowing whether a professional security audit was done and if there is a public security pentesting program. This is especially important given the blast radius of an authentication service.

Cloudflare tunnels do not work in certain countries (e.g.Russia), Pangolin does.

How does this compare to other OSS like zrok?

genuine, security newbie, question. What's the worst case scenario that can happen on using this type of solution from a security standpoint? I do get it the authentication would be compromised. Probably some internal ports would be exposed publicly too.. what else?