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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

(github.com)
478 points miloschwartz | 15 comments | 10 Jul 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.719s | source | bottom

Pangolin is an open source self-hosted tunneled reverse proxy management server with identity and access control, designed to securely expose private resources through encrypted WireGuard tunnels running in user space.

We made Pangolin so you retain full control over your infrastructure while providing a user-friendly and feature-rich solution for managing proxies, authentication, and access, all with a clean and simple dashboard web UI.

GitHub: https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

Deployment takes about 5 minutes on a VPS: https://docs.fossorial.io/Getting%20Started/quick-install

Demo by Lawrence Systems (YouTube): https://youtu.be/g5qOpxhhS7M?si=M1XTWLGLUZW0WzTv&t=723

Some use cases:

  - Grant users access to your apps from anywhere using just a web-browser

  - Proxy behind CGNAT

  - One application load balancer across multiple clouds and on-premises

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

  - Bring localhost online for easy access
A few key features:

  - No port forwarding and hide your public IP for self-hosting

  - Create proxies to multiple different private networks

  - OAuth2/OIDC identity providers

  - Role-based access control

  - Raw TCP and UDP support

  - Resource-specific pin codes, passwords, email OTP

  - Self-destructing shareable links

  - API for automation

  - WAF with CrowdSec and Geoblocking
1. fossorialowen ◴[10 Jul 25 21:53 UTC] No.44526044[source]▶
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!

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2. PeterStuer ◴[11 Jul 25 06:25 UTC] No.44528933[source]▶
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

replies(1): >>44529690 #
3. oulipo ◴[11 Jul 25 07:36 UTC] No.44529332[source]▶
Would be nice if there were a mini-tutorial in the doc for each of the use-cases you mention here, so we could quickly test it and see if it helps
replies(1): >>44534209 #
4. v5v3 ◴[11 Jul 25 08:35 UTC] No.44529690[source]▶
What's Newt?
replies(1): >>44529809 #
5. PeterStuer ◴[11 Jul 25 08:51 UTC] No.44529809{3}[source]▶
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.
6. hardwaresofton ◴[11 Jul 25 11:45 UTC] No.44531036[source]▶
> Pangolin uses Traefik under the hood to do the actual HTTP proxying.

Traefik is awesome, and one of the biggest reasons is it's extensibility and robustness.

It absolutely does not get enough attention!

replies(1): >>44531252 #
7. jtbaker ◴[11 Jul 25 12:13 UTC] No.44531252[source]▶
I’m using it as my ingress controller on my K3S homelab and it has definitely been a nice DX so far.

The one thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do with it is do compression (gzip/br/zstd) there, so I’m handling it in the application layer, which feels suboptimal.

Any tips? Seems like a table stakes sort of feature in the space that shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

replies(1): >>44531323 #
8. hardwaresofton ◴[11 Jul 25 12:23 UTC] No.44531323{3}[source]▶
Did the compress middleware not work for you?

https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/middlewares/http/compress/

Are you trying to compress the request that has already come in to your cluster? I'm not sure there's a ton of value to be extracted there, since the requests have already made their way across the internet uncompressed to your ingress point.

If there's a "long way" to go after hitting your ingress controller then maybe there's something to be gained...

9. fossorialowen ◴[11 Jul 25 16:37 UTC] No.44534209[source]▶
Coming soon! We are going to do a docs revamp!
replies(2): >>44541930 #>>44542262 #
10. 1vuio0pswjnm7 ◴[11 Jul 25 17:51 UTC] No.44535120[source]▶
The official traefik v3.4.4 amd64 binary from Github is only 207MB.

https://github.com/traefik/traefik/releases/expanded_assets/...

replies(1): >>44536416 #
11. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[11 Jul 25 20:18 UTC] No.44536416[source]▶
An entire docker image for HAProxy is only 41 MB... deb is 1.6 MB
replies(2): >>44536767 #>>44537292 #
12. sgarland ◴[11 Jul 25 21:04 UTC] No.44536767{3}[source]▶
Welcome to modern development, where no one gives a shit about binary size. It’s awful.
13. 1vuio0pswjnm7 ◴[11 Jul 25 22:13 UTC] No.44537292{3}[source]▶
I compile static-pie HAproxy binaries using different TLS libraries. Size varies a little based on the versions and compile-time options for those libraries

For example, max sizes for the largest and smallest TLS libraries I have tried

OpenSSL 9.0MB

WolfSSL 4.6MB

OpenSSL bloat is unfortunate

Does Traefik allow any TLS libraries other than OpenSSL

14. oulipo ◴[12 Jul 25 13:30 UTC] No.44541930{3}[source]▶
That would be so nice!
15. oulipo ◴[12 Jul 25 14:18 UTC] No.44542262{3}[source]▶
BTW check the tutorial for Incus it's great! Don't know if you can do something similar with Pangolin but this would be amazing to get a sense of what's possible to do!

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it