Private, ngrok-like Dev Servers with Tailscale
Summary
This past week, I learned that its possible to run Tailscale in a local on a developers workstation, and securely allow access to services in the docker-compose file to other users on your Tailnet. This functionality has many and varied applications, such as more easily allowing developers to pair test a bug, serving as a replacement for ngrok (which is also great! I modified this slightly to give myself a user-specific nginx installation on our Tailnet, and had it running in a few minutes: By appending to the hostname of the container, I end up with a "tailscale-nginx-tobias" hostname on our tailnet that I can use to access the nginx container from any device on our Tailnet: Since I have also logged into Tailscale on an Android device Im using for testing this application, I can connect directly to my local dev server from Android without the headache and security risk of ensuring Im on the same wifi network and allowing public access to my local machine. Similarly, I can give out this hostname to other trusted users on my organizations Tailnet, and they can help me test a bug fix or even design a new feature from afar. I hope this post helped you find another way to share local dev server access securely when needed.