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How to connect docker containers to tailscale?

Help Needed

I've read through several posts here but haven't found (or rather understood) a straightforward method to connect a docker container to my tailscale network. I am running tailscale on the host machine (not in a docker container) and I would like to connect my delugevpn docker container to this network. I've tried to set up exit nodes and port-forwarding but I'm having a difficult time understanding the process for this. Does anyone have any guidance for this process? Thanks!

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https://tailscale.dev/blog/docker-mod-tailscale

• • Edited

This looks like a convenient solution! However, when trying to run compose it gives me the error: yaml: line 8: did not find expected key. Line 8 in my compose file is where the environment variables start. I added a newly generated auth key to TAILSCALE_AUTHKEY so I'm not sure why I'm getting this error. Any suggestions?

Edit: I moved the mod snippet to the top of the environment variables section and now I get the error yaml: line 8: did not find expected '-' indicator. I do have the '' - ' in place though. I am supposed to add the mod snippet to the environment variables of the delugevpn container, correct?

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You can just specify that the docker's ports attach to the Tailscale IP address like this:

<tailscale-ip>:port:port for e.g. 100.34.89.23:80:80

• • Edited

The networking should be in the host mode, right?

What if it’s bridged, like connected to the network of a reverse proxy container?

Can you have one Tailscale instance on the host, accessing all containers instead of one side car container for each application container, like suggested here

https://tailscale.com/blog/docker-tailscale-guide

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So under the ports section of the container (in the compose file) just add - <tailscale-ip>:port:port? With the correct IP and port numbers ofc.

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I know I'm late to the party, but this might be the solution I'm looking for. In theory you would:

  1. Install Tailscale on the machine running docker.

  2. List "<tailscale-ip>:port:port" for the ports in the config file of each docker container.

Now you should be able to access the all the docker containers from a machine inside your tailnet without exposing any ports on the host machine? Also, you wouldn't have to do the service linking, correct?

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