Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

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

500 points by miloschwartz 311 days ago | 125 comments

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

44za12 311 days 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.

adr1an 304 days ago | |

Pangolin keeps evolving. Here's a great overview from 3 months ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VdwOL7nYkY

44za12 310 days ago | |

More on it here, for those interested:

https://aazar.me/posts/reincarnating-a-raspberry-pi

gowthamgts12 310 days ago | | |

Getting `Cloudflare Tunnel error`

noduerme 311 days 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?

oschwartz10612 311 days 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?

barbazoo 311 days 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?

wredcoll 310 days ago | | |

If you have an internal app or homelab app or whatever, why don't you just... route to it? Configure your firewall to let traffic in and out?

I get there's a tunnel provided by this sort of software, I just don't understand how so many people actually need one.

noduerme 311 days ago | | |

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

j45 311 days ago | |

Tailscale (and headscale) is great for internal access to something that night not have public internet access. Others have mentioned an example of keeping a NAS off the public internet.

Cloudflare tunnels help expose a service to the internet with a bit more protection.

I have seen folks use both tailscale to access the backend and the public side is only Cloudflare tunnels.

It’s not unreasonable to point Cloudflare tunnels to a central and internal nginx proxy manager.

Tailscale can route the public internet into your services too can do this too but the protections in Cloudflare are likely a little more robust.

Panagolin looks interesting enough to try out, it could sit run behind Cloudflare tunnels while testing and then moved out.

Lord_Zero 310 days ago | | |

I'm using caprover on a Linux VM with tailscale and cloudflare. Works great, it does require some tinkering because caprover doesn't like not being in control of SSL, and the nginx configs need to be manually edited per app if you want to set up headers for cloudflare real ip and stuff.

mbesto 311 days 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 311 days ago | | |

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

hexfish 311 days 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.

oschwartz10612 311 days 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 311 days 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 311 days ago | | |

What's Newt?

oulipo 311 days 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

fossorialowen 310 days ago | | |

Coming soon! We are going to do a docs revamp!

hardwaresofton 311 days ago | |

> 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!

jtbaker 311 days ago | | |

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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 310 days ago | |

The official traefik v3.4.4 amd64 binary from Github is only 207MB.

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

PhilippGille 311 days 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.

mekster 310 days ago | |

Which one is as feature packed as Pangolin with a working web UI?

djlameche 311 days 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 311 days 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.

djlameche 311 days ago | | |

I'm not using anything YET. I am thinking about hosting a pepper variety database I am developing on a VPS for public use. I want to use Keycloak for authentication and also some other services alongside (eg. a headless CMS for writing some of the content).

The thing is, I don't have any prior experience with hosting at all. So I am wondering if I can reduce attack surface by making "management" services (Keycloak admin console, the headless CMS admin interface etc.) accessible only to me...

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Good advice in this thread. If its just you then ssh tunnels or tailscale or netbird or pure wireguard are all fine. You could use Pangolin for this and put auth in front of the web page of Keycloak using a local Pangolin site and that would be fine too. It depends on how important the security is to you and who else might want access.

zakki 311 days 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 311 days 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 311 days 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 311 days ago | |

You want Tailscale for that.

coderhs 311 days 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?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Yes it can! You can point them all to the VPS as you say then just add them to the config file domains list. You can add as many as you need. https://docs.fossorial.io/Pangolin/Configuration/config#doma...

nirav72 310 days ago |

Great seeing Pangolin posted on Show HN. I just got pangolin installed and configured this afternoon on a VPS. With Newt running locally on a cheap mini-pc to establish wireguard tunnel. It was a fairly easy process. Watched couple of videos on YT and then went through the well documented procedure on their site. So far everything seems to be working. I currently only have couple of apps exposed. Plus a private relay for Rustdesk. All working great. Plan on exposing/moving stuff off CF in the coming days. Once I lock down my home network and isolate stuff on separate VLANs.

While CF tunnels were nice and solved my ISP imposed issue with exposing ports via their crappy fiber gateway for couple of years. But I wanted more control. Specifically control over what I can expose without worrying about violating cloudflare’s TOS and ambiguity around media streaming. (Jellyfin/Emby).

topgungtr99 297 days ago |

This sounds a bit like OpenZiti & Zrok, but still sounds interesting, I'll give it a try as I do use Cloudflare tunnels a fair bit.

nickspacek 311 days ago |

My homelab has a setup like this, but all done somewhat-manually. HTTPS for my Docker images running in the homelab via a certbot image. A Wireguard setup to connect the homelab to a small Hetzner VPS, and a proxy there to allow certain traffic through.

I've been wanting to add some authentication lately so that I can manage access to the homelab resources. I currently prohibit all traffic and only allow the Wireguard subnet, but this means any clients have to be provisioned in Wireguard, which is a nuisance to setup manually. It does seem to work well enough though.

Pangolin seems like it would be a one-stop replacement and simplify the setup, especially once I look at adding user management to the mix.

wredcoll 310 days ago | |

I keep seeing people say they run things like this and I continue to be confused.

> proxy there to allow certain traffic through.

Why not just run the proxy .. on your homelab?

LucidLynx 311 days 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 311 days 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 311 days 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 :)

oschwartz10612 310 days ago | | |

Pangolin is "public ingress to private networks" and not a mesh VPN/network builder. As you say I think NetBird is an alternative to Tailscale and we are an alternative to Cloudflare tunnels, Ngrok, or Zscaler. It is more about exposing things publicly with authentication in the browser for people to access than about building a network for disparate devices to communicate.

rb666 311 days ago | | |

Pangolin also uses WireGuard and does not lock features behind a paywall.

_shadi 309 days ago |

This project sounds really interesting as an alternative to cloudflare and for decentralizating the internet, but for some low traffic home server what would I gain with using it instead of directly exposing a single port on my home server with nginx, I have static IP from my ISP, right now it is exposed as the server IP, what would I gain if I use a cheap vps as a proxy first?

nicolas_ 311 days 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!

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Thanks!

nodesocket 311 days 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 311 days 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!

PoKeRGT 311 days 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.

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Great good to hear!

paffdragon 311 days ago |

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?

paffdragon 311 days ago | |

EDIT: Sorry, I misread, Newt is the WireGuard client and is based on wireguard-go if I'm correct.

fossorialowen 310 days ago | | |

Yep thats correct. All based on wireguard-go. It is growing in what it can do now but at its core its just a Wireguard wrapper that coordinates with Pangolin to get the tunnel up. It also runs in netstack user space so it does not need kernel permissions to open a port and it's only egress is proxied out with TCP/UDP reverse proxies built in to access what is needed on the network.

noname120 311 days ago |

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.

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

We are always looking for security experts to review the code and to pen test the application. Please hammer it and let us know at privacy@fossorial.io if there are any issues!

As the project grows and we have more resources to spend we will try to work with some professional service to take a look for sure.

lionkor 311 days ago | |

Im sure if there was an audit, it would say so

raphinou 311 days 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.

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Yes we have had some PR and some active ones that we need to merge soon haha.

We have not had any concern about the CLA that we are aware of. It was important that we found a way to allow businesses to pay for something to fund the project while keeping it free for individual homelabbers so this was one effort in that regard.

aborsy 311 days 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.

fossorialowen 311 days 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 311 days 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”

mekster 311 days ago | |

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

aborsy 311 days ago | | |

TLS pass through. You simply route encrypted traffic to your home. The keys to the castle are all in home!

meteyor 311 days ago |

Let’s say my server is running on a VPN and gets new IP once in a while. Would Pangolin be an option to publicly expose my services? Because I have this challenge now where I am currently ”forced” to expose my public IP to share some services. I use firewall rules to allow incoming traffic to my server and Traefik to route the user to the right service. I just don’t like the feeling of being exposed publicly like this.

c0wb0yc0d3r 311 days ago | |

You need a publicly routable address in the mix. You would need a way of knowing that address.

I have that same feeling with the self hosting I do. To alleviate the small amount of stress it would bring me I rent a VPS that’s public on the internet. I configure a persistent keep alive, on the client I run locally to keep a connection to the server open, no port forwarding needed.

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Yes! Most people I think rent a VPS (some can be had for like $1 a month) and install this. Because it tunnels back to your network your network can be anywhere behind anything and it should hole punch to it. And because the public is visiting the public address of the VPS your network is hidden behind that!

qskousen 310 days ago |

I've been trying to get something like this working with frp and now sish but I'm not there yet. My use case is a little weird, I need to run the tunnel behind a traefik instance in k8s, with that traefik doing TLS termination, and I haven't been able to get anything working correctly yet. Maybe I'll give pangolin a try.

gavt45 310 days ago |

Hi! I'm using traefik as reverse proxy for my homelab. Would it be possible to combine Pangolin with it while preserving already defined routes and services? Or do I need to run separate instance of traefik for Pangolin behind already existing one?

SaultyCracker 311 days ago |

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

kbumsik 310 days ago |

How does it compare to frp, one of the most popular Open Source Cloudflare Tunnel alternative?

https://github.com/fatedier/frp

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

I think with the web UI it is a little more user friendly but not as super familiar with FRP. I think we might have a little more authentication control on top of the tunnel for web traffic as well.

oulipo 311 days 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?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

From the little I understand about it I think you may be able to deploy Pangolin on it. Would need to do some research. But you could also use Pangolin to provide access to a self hosted Dokploy application I think.

oulipo 310 days ago | | |

Nice, because Dokploy also uses Traefik to give a reverse proxy access to the services deployed there. Ideally I'd keep it that way, and also use Pangolin in order to add a login for services which don't "natively" have one, in order to protect access, how would I go about doing that?

oulipo 311 days 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?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

It might be a bit too heavy for a MCU like ESPs. IoT we are thinking more like cellular modems, UPSs, cameras - devices that need remote access in the field at remote places that you typically would need a more convoluted VPN setup for.

Dowwie 311 days ago |

Cloudflare tunnels is such a poorly built product. The bar for quality is very low in this category. I struggled to make it work on an dell laptop running ubuntu, over wifi. It worked when I set it up at my home and then failed when it was deployed in the field. I literally had the experience of "well, it worked at my home, let's ship it!". I couldn't recover from the errors, either.

So, if you built something that is resilient enough to handle change in IP addresses, you've beaten CF tunnels.

oschwartz10612 310 days ago | |

We are coming for them!

iAm25626 310 days ago |

I still use Cloudflare Tunnel(cap) but anything new is going to OpenZiti/Zrok (grow). Openziti/Zrok are amazing.

immibis 310 days ago |

Don't you also need a server? The point of cloudflare is that they give you use of their server, for free.

snickmy 311 days ago |

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?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Good question. I think absolute worse case scenario the tunnel and VPS is compromised and someone is able to gain access to the private network. We advise people in the docs to always consider this a possibility and secure Newt and what is has access to. A slightly worse case is there is a bypass in the forward auth and someone can get access to the webpage of a private service without passing the user/pass auth etc.

We are always looking for security experts to review the code and to pen test the application. Please hammer it and let us know at security@fossorial.io if there are any issues!

pakue 310 days ago | | |

I’m running pangolin for a couple months now and instead of newt I use my router WireGuard Client in a VLAN. Any „wanted“ traffic is then routed via DNAT/firewall to my home server.

gsck 311 days ago |

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

heavyset_go 311 days ago |

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

fossorialowen 311 days 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.

heavyset_go 309 days ago | | |

Thanks for the comment

Looks like it depends on bridge networking according the sample docker-compose.yml in the docs. Unfortunately, Docker Swarm eschews bridging, but I'm going to poke at it anyway and see if I can get it to work

lucyv 311 days ago |

Is it called Pangolin because pangolin's have scale-y tails?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

Yes and they are a "Fossorial" animal. A fossorial animal is one that is adapted to digging and which lives primarily (but not solely) underground. It was kind of a fun name to call out the tunneling. Fossorial is our company name.

d0100 311 days ago |

How does this compare to other OSS like zrok?

fossorialowen 310 days ago | |

It looks like there might be some overlap. There are a bunch of solutions in this space! It looks like they do provide public access to resources which is what Pangolin does. We might have a bit more of authentication options but dont hold me to that.

We are working on some "client" based solutions as well similar maybe to what Zrok is doing which we may release in Beta in the next couple of weeks!

vanillax 308 days ago |

How does this play on kubernetes?

esseph 310 days ago |

This looks awesome!

PornMan 310 days ago |

I heckin love porn!

pancsta 311 days ago |

Reverse proxy in nodejs? How about no?

oschwartz10612 310 days ago | |

Haha valid concern. We are actually using Traefik to do the reverse proxying which is a pretty standard reverse proxy written in Go! Our tunnel client Newt is also written in Go. The pangolin UI and control plane is typescript though.

jz10 311 days 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

hammyhavoc 311 days ago | |

What do you find lacking in the web interface?

jz10 311 days 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#...

mekster 311 days ago | |

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

tday1 311 days 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.