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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

(github.com)
478 points miloschwartz | 1 comments | 10 Jul 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | 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
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noduerme ◴[11 Jul 25 02:29 UTC] No.44527896[source]▶
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?

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mbesto ◴[11 Jul 25 04:13 UTC] No.44528323[source]▶
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/service and automatically creates an SSL cert for me. I love it.

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jonotime ◴[11 Jul 25 05:08 UTC] No.44528584[source]▶
Out of curiosity why not give your sister restricted access to your tailnet instead? Then nothing is public.
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noduerme ◴[11 Jul 25 08:30 UTC] No.44529659[source]▶
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.

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1. subscribed ◴[11 Jul 25 11:24 UTC] No.44530901[source]▶
To me, another huge no-no is the apparent lack of option to stop Plex from sending all the filenames to the mothership.