Trace LLM workflows at your app's semantic level, not at the OpenAI API boundary (engineeringideas.substack.com)

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

Comments (46)

fossorialowen · 11h ago

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!

PeterStuer · 2h ago

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

v5v3 · 31m ago

What's Newt?

PeterStuer · 15m ago

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.

oulipo · 1h ago

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

PhilippGille · 37m ago

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.

LucidLynx · 1h ago

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

https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

dizhn · 13m ago

I believe netbird does not have all the features in the open source version. The one thing that was a show stopper for me was the SSO tax.

resiros · 27m ago

Would love to understand it better too. It looks like the use cases are similar but the tech is different. NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale that uses Wireguard under the hood while these seem to use Traefik under the hood.

I am personally a user of NetBird and love it.

The design of the UI is very similar though :)

noduerme · 6h ago

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?

fossorialowen · 6h ago

Thanks!

I think what you are using (SSH, Tailscale) is great for your use case! We see this as more of a static and permanent tunnel to a service - less ephemeral than a ssh tunnel - and more to get public users into your application. Meaning if you had a internal app for your business or some homelab application like Immich or Grafana at home/work that you want to expose to your family in their browser this could be a good tool to use. Does that make sense?

noduerme · 43m ago

That makes a ton of sense actually! I'm excited to give it a try!

barbazoo · 4h ago

I’m using an nginxproxymanager as reverse proxy and ssl terminus for exactly that, Immich, home assistant, etc. What would I gain from your solution?

fossorialowen · 4h ago

I think if that works for you then stick with it! Pangolin would mostly do the same thing. I think if you wanted more auth control like users and pin codes and OIDC and roles you might not get that with NPM out of the box but could add on.

Pangolin has a tunnel component to it so if you were challenged on the ISP front you can put this on the VPS and it just makes configuring the connection back to the network easier so you don't need to set up WG back etc... It wraps it all up nicely in a UI and simple install script. It can also all be automated with the API if you are into that kind of thing.

mbesto · 4h ago

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.

jonotime · 3h ago

Out of curiosity why not give your sister restricted access to your tailnet instead? Then nothing is public.

noduerme · 36m ago

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.

omnimus · 2h ago

My guess is that teaching and convincing someone to install tailscale on every device they need access is a lot harder than sending a link.

Thats why i use pangolin.

hexfish · 2h ago

Are you aware that serving media streams over the tunnel might be against the ToS? This is what kept me from using it tbh.

44za12 · 57m ago

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.

coderhs · 2h ago

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?

djlameche · 1h ago

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?

dizhn · 9m ago

Don't you use Keycloak for SSO? The ports needed for that needs to be accessible so services can talk to it. If there's a dedicated port for management you can still use it with software like pangolin. Run the management service on only a local port and access using this software or wireguad.

I use authentik and as far as I know the management is on the same web port so I have to allow some paths to be accessible to the world.

zakki · 55m ago

I guess you have to use firewall as well. So basically you block any access from internet except VPN service. And you can have rule which IP allowed to access your VPN service.

TheTxT · 1h ago

Did you already consider using ssh port forwarding? That way you can temporarily forward the local port that keycloak is running on to your machine

djlameche · 43m ago

I did not consider it yet, I will look into it. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety databse that I am developing, but I have 0 experience with hosting software, so I am a bit wary about what I will be exposing...

jychang · 46m ago

You want Tailscale for that.

raphinou · 1h ago

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.

PoKeRGT · 3h ago

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.

nicolas_ · 5h ago

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!

aborsy · 3h ago

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.

mekster · 25m ago

What can you even do if you can't trust a VPS provider?

fossorialowen · 3h ago

This is true! But you have a little more control over who you might choose to trust. For example - you might trust AWS not to snoop in your VM more than you might trust CF to not collect valuable usage data about you when they decrypt your traffic.

scottgg · 13m ago

Agreed - there’s a big difference between “I actively asked CF to terminate my TLS” and “I suspect my provider is scraping unencrypted data out of my running VM”

heavyset_go · 5h ago

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

fossorialowen · 4h ago

Yes I think so. I know it works quiet well in compose but as you scale to swarm I am not sure if there would be pains. You can just pop the connector into your compose stack and it will connect to anything in the docker network which we personally do to host some of our basic infrastructure.

oulipo · 1h ago

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?

oulipo · 1h ago

"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?

nodesocket · 5h ago

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)?

fossorialowen · 4h ago

Yes! Thats where it excels I think. If you want public authenticated access for your users and / or need that tunneling component to get into your network or a set of distributed networks then Pangolin is your animal!

jz10 · 6h ago

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

mekster · 22m ago

You found it early enough. I guess it's not even 1 year old.

hammyhavoc · 6h ago

What do you find lacking in the web interface?

jz10 · 5h ago

Sounds a bit nitpicky now that I put it into words but most of my usage is just on the public hostnames panel which is about 3-4 levels deep from the dashboard. There is also a UI disconnect between this and the DNS records screen

I do this flow a number of times and the TUI I made solved this specific problem for me https://github.com/justingosan/tunnelman?tab=readme-ov-file#...

jallmann · 4h ago

Yes, this exactly - I wouldn't call it nitpicky, it is really buried in there. I understand Cloudflare has a ton of other products and features, but the discoverability for CF Tunnels really could be better.

Just checked and it's:

Dashboard home > Zero Trust > Networks > Tunnels > [tunnel] > Public Hostname

And if it ends up provisioning a new DNS record, I always have to remember to go back to the domain's DNS screen and label it with the tunnel.

In general I use a tiny silver of Cloudflare's capabilities; it would be nice if the primary dashboard could bubble up the parts that I do use.

tday1 · 6h ago

This is exactly what I have been looking for!

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

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Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

Comments (46)