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Running headscale on OpenBSD

Community documentation

This page is not actively maintained by the headscale authors and is written by community members. It is not verified by headscale developers.

It might be outdated and it might miss necessary steps.

Goal

This documentation has the goal of showing a user how-to install and run headscale on OpenBSD 7.1. In additional to the "get up and running section", there is an optional rc.d section describing how to make headscale run properly in a server environment.

Install headscale

  1. Install from ports (Not Recommend)

As of OpenBSD 7.2, there's a headscale in ports collection, however, it's severely outdated(v0.12.4). You can install it via pkg_add headscale.

  1. Install from source on OpenBSD 7.2
# Install prerequistes
pkg_add go

git clone https://github.com/juanfont/headscale.git

cd headscale

# optionally checkout a release
# option a. you can find offical relase at https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/releases/latest
# option b. get latest tag, this may be a beta release
latestTag=$(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)

git checkout $latestTag

go build -ldflags="-s -w -X github.com/juanfont/headscale/cmd/headscale/cli.Version=$latestTag" github.com/juanfont/headscale

# make it executable
chmod a+x headscale

# copy it to /usr/local/sbin
cp headscale /usr/local/sbin
  1. Install from source via cross compile
# Install prerequistes
# 1. go v1.20+: headscale newer than 0.21 needs go 1.20+ to compile
# 2. gmake: Makefile in the headscale repo is written in GNU make syntax

git clone https://github.com/juanfont/headscale.git

cd headscale

# optionally checkout a release
# option a. you can find offical relase at https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/releases/latest
# option b. get latest tag, this may be a beta release
latestTag=$(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)

git checkout $latestTag

make build GOOS=openbsd

# copy headscale to openbsd machine and put it in /usr/local/sbin

Configure and run headscale

  1. Prepare a directory to hold headscale configuration and the SQLite database:
# Directory for configuration

mkdir -p /etc/headscale

# Directory for Database, and other variable data (like certificates)
mkdir -p /var/lib/headscale
  1. Create an empty SQLite database:
touch /var/lib/headscale/db.sqlite
  1. Create a headscale configuration:
touch /etc/headscale/config.yaml

(Strongly Recommended) Download a copy of the [example configuration]config-example.yaml from the headscale repository.

  1. Start the headscale server:
headscale serve

This command will start headscale in the current terminal session.

To continue the tutorial, open a new terminal and let it run in the background. Alternatively use terminal emulators like tmux.

To run headscale in the background, please follow the steps in the rc.d section before continuing.

  1. Verify headscale is running:

Verify headscale is available:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9090/metrics
  1. Create a user (tailnet):
headscale users create myfirstuser

Register a machine (normal login)

On a client machine, execute the tailscale login command:

tailscale up --login-server YOUR_HEADSCALE_URL

Register the machine:

headscale --user myfirstuser nodes register --key <YOU_+MACHINE_KEY>

Register machine using a pre authenticated key

Generate a key using the command line:

headscale --user myfirstuser preauthkeys create --reusable --expiration 24h

This will return a pre-authenticated key that can be used to connect a node to headscale during the tailscale command:

tailscale up --login-server <YOUR_HEADSCALE_URL> --authkey <YOUR_AUTH_KEY>

Running headscale in the background with rc.d

This section demonstrates how to run headscale as a service in the background with rc.d.

  1. Create a rc.d service at /etc/rc.d/headscale containing:
#!/bin/ksh

daemon="/usr/local/sbin/headscale"
daemon_logger="daemon.info"
daemon_user="root"
daemon_flags="serve"
daemon_timeout=60

. /etc/rc.d/rc.subr

rc_bg=YES
rc_reload=NO

rc_cmd $1
  1. /etc/rc.d/headscale needs execute permission:
chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/headscale
  1. Start headscale service:
rcctl start headscale
  1. Make headscale service start at boot:
rcctl enable headscale
  1. Verify the headscale service:
rcctl check headscale

Verify headscale is available:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9090/metrics

headscale will now run in the background and start at boot.