tailout

tailout is a command-line tool for quickly creating a cloud-based exit node in your tailnet.

Installation

To install tailout, you can download the latest release from the releases page.

You can also use the go install command:

go install github.com/cterence/tailout@latest

Prerequisites

To use tailout, you'll need to have the following installed:

• Tailscale
• An AWS account

At the moment, tailout only supports AWS as a cloud provider. Support for other cloud providers will be added in the future.

Setup

Go to your Tailscale API key settings and:

• Create an API key for tailout
• Create a file in ~/.tailout/config.yaml with the following content:

  tailscale:
  api_key: tskey-api-xxx-xxx
  tailnet: <your tailnet name>

• Run tailout init, review the changes that will be done to your policy and accept
• Go back to your Tailscale API key settings
• Create an auth key with the following characteristics:
  • Is reusable
  • Is ephemeral
  • Automatically adds the newly created tag:tailout tag to each device
• Add your auth key to the config file

Next, you will also need to set up your AWS credentials. tailout will look for default credentials, like environment variables for access keys or an AWS profile.

To easily check if your credentials are set up correctly, you can use the aws sts get-caller-identity command.

Usage

Create an exit node in your tailnet:

tailout create

Connect to your exit node:

tailout connect

Get the status of your exit node:

tailout status

Disconnect from your exit node:

tailout disconnect

Delete your exit node:

tailout stop

Configuration

tailout will look for a configuration file at the following paths:

• /etc/tailout/config.{yml,yaml,hcl,json,toml}
• $HOME/.tailout/config.{yml,yaml,hcl,json,toml}

For exemple, you could have this content in /etc/tailout/config.yml:

tailscale:
  api_key: tskey-api-xxx-xxx
  auth_key: tskey-auth-xxx-xxx
  tailnet: <your tailnet name>
region: eu-west-3
create:
  shutdown: 15m

You can specify any of the above settings as command-line flags or environment variables prefixed by TAILOUT_.

For example, to specify the Tailscale API key, you can use the --tailscale-api-key flag or the TAILOUT_TAILSCALE_API_KEY environment variable.