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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

(github.com)
478 points miloschwartz | 2 comments | 10 Jul 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.425s | source

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
Show context
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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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

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1. v5v3 ◴[11 Jul 25 08:35 UTC] No.44529690[source]▶
What's Newt?
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2. PeterStuer ◴[11 Jul 25 08:51 UTC] No.44529809[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.