On macOS the tailscale up command provided by the bundled executable does some extra closed-source daemon starting magic that the open-source SDK doesn't know how to do. If you clone https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale and directly go run tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale -- up, you get an equivalent error to what we are seeing:
failed to connect to local Tailscale service; is Tailscale running?
On macOS the
tailscale upcommand provided by the bundled executable does some extra closed-source daemon starting magic that the open-source SDK doesn't know how to do. If you clone https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale and directlygo run tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale -- up, you get an equivalent error to what we are seeing: