rails-lambda / tailscale-extension

Tailscale Lambda Extension for Containers

Tailscale Lambda Extension for Containers

Inspired by Corey Quinn's tailscale-layer project. This project aims to do the same thing but usable for those working with any Lambda Container runtime language. Our extension has been modified from Corey's upstream work. I have removed verbose logging and event lifecycle hooks. This has reduced startup overhead, duplicate tailscale up calls, and more configuration options.

Installation

We have pre-build container packages which include the Tailscale Lambda Extension within a basic Docker scratch image containing everything needed to copy to your /opt directory. For example:

FROM public.ecr.aws/lambda/ruby:3.2
RUN yum install -y curl
COPY --from=ghcr.io/rails-lambda/tailscale-extension-amzn:1 /opt /opt

⚠️ Make sure curl is installed since the Tailscale Extension script will need it.

Environment Variables

You will need to generate an ephemeral key within your Tailscale account. Note, this will expire and need updating depending on the time period you select. List of the environment variables include:

• TS_KEY - Required. Your ephemeral key.
• TS_HOSTNAME - Optional. The value of --hostname parameter. Default lambda.

OSs & Architectures

We publish multi-platform images for both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64/v8 and we also have Amazon Linux 2 and Debian/Ubuntu variants.

• ghcr.io/rails-lambda/tailscale-extension-amzn
• ghcr.io/rails-lambda/tailscale-extension-debian

Example Usage

📚 Using Tailscale on Lambda for a Live Development Proxy

Once your Lambda function starts, you will have a SOCKS5 proxy which can communicate with your Tailscale tailnet at http://localhost:1055. Here is an example of how to leverage that with Ruby's socksify gem.

Net::HTTP.socks_proxy('localhost', 1055).start(...) do |http|
  # your http code here...
end

Again, this extension is not coupled to any runtime language. So how you use the SOCKS5 proxy is up to you. Enjoy!