golink is a private shortlink service for your tailnet. It lets you create short, memorable links for the websites you and your team use most. If you're new to golink, learn more in our announcement blog post. If you were looking for a SaaS go link service that doesn't use Tailscale, you might be thinking of golinks.io or trot.to
To build from source and run in dev mode:
go run ./cmd/golink -dev-listen :8080
golink will be available at https://localhost:8080/, storing links in a temporary database, and will not attempt to join a tailnet.
The equivalent using the pre-built docker image:
docker run -it --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/tailscale/golink:main -dev-listen :8080
If you receive the docker error unable to open database file: out of memory (14)
,
use a persistent volume as documented in Running in production.
Create an auth key for your tailnet at https://login.tailscale.com/admin/settings/keys. Configure the auth key to your preferences, but at a minimum we generally recommend:
- add a tag (maybe something like
tag:golink
) to make it easier to set ACLs for controlling access and to ensure the node doesn't expires. - don't set "ephemeral" so the node isn't removed if it goes offline
Once you have a key, set it as the TS_AUTHKEY
environment variable when starting golink.
You will also need to specify your sqlite database file:
TS_AUTHKEY="tskey-auth-<key>" go run ./cmd/golink -sqlitedb golink.db
golink stores its tailscale data files in a tsnet-golink
directory inside os.UserConfigDir.
As long as this is on a persistent volume, the auth key only needs to be provided on first run.
When golink joins your tailnet, it will attempt to use "go" as its node name, and will be available at https://go.tailnet0000.ts.net/ (or whatever your tailnet name is). To make it accessible simply as https://go/, enable MagicDNS for your tailnet. With MagicDNS enabled, no special configuration or browser extensions are needed on client devices. Users just need to have Tailscale installed and connected to the tailnet.
golink compiles as a single static binary (including the frontend) and can be deployed and run like any other binary. Two pieces of data should be on persistent volumes:
- tailscale data files in the
tsnet-golink
directory inside os.UserConfigDir - the sqlite database file where links are stored
In the docker image, both are stored in /home/nonroot
, so you can mount a persistent volume:
docker run -v /persistent/data:/home/nonroot ghcr.io/tailscale/golink:main
The mounted directory will need to be writable by the nonroot user (uid: 65532, gid: 65532),
for example by calling sudo chown 65532 /persistent/data
.
Alternatively, you can run golink as root using docker run -u root
.
No ports need to be exposed, whether running as a binary or in docker. golink will listen on port 80 on the tailscale interface, so can be accessed at https://go/.
Deploy on Fly
See https://fly.io/docs/ for full instructions for deploying apps on Fly, but this should give you a good start.
Replace FLY_APP_NAME
and FLY_VOLUME_NAME
with your app and volume names.
Create a fly.toml file:
app = "FLY_APP_NAME"
[build]
image = "ghcr.io/tailscale/golink:main"
[deploy]
strategy = "immediate"
[mounts]
source="FLY_VOLUME_NAME"
destination="/root"
Then run the commands with the flyctl CLI.
$ flyctl apps create FLY_APP_NAME
$ flyctl volumes create FLY_VOLUME_NAME
$ flyctl secrets set TS_AUTHKEY=tskey-auth-<key>
$ flyctl deploy
Once you have golink running, you can backup all of your links in JSON lines format from https://go/.export. At Tailscale, we snapshot our links weekly and store them in git.
To restore links, specify the snapshot file on startup. Only links that don't already exist in the database will be added.
golink -snapshot links.json
You can also resolve links locally using a snapshot file:
golink -resolve-from-backup links.json go/link