tclip

A self-hostable pastebin for your tailnet. It can store an infinite* number of pastes.

Development

1. Install Nix
2. Enable flakes
3. nix develop

You can then test your changes to tclip by running go run ./cmd/tclipd or go run ./cmd/tclip as appropriate.

Note that for the first run of ./cmd/tclipd, you must set either the TS_AUTHKEY environment variable, or run it with --tsnet-verbose to get the login URL for Tailscale.

Building for prod

The web server:

nix build .#tclipd

The docker image:

nix build .#docker
docker load < ./result

The portable service image:

nix build .#portable-service

Configuration

These configuration options are available as command-line flags and environment variables. All of them are optional.

Command-line flag	Environment variable	Default value	Description
-hostname	TSNET_HOSTNAME	paste	The hostname to use on your tailnet.
-data-location	DATA_DIR	~/.config/tailscale/paste	Where program data is stored.
-tsnet-verbose	TSNET_VERBOSE	false	If set, tsnet will log verbosely to stderr.
-use-funnel	USE_FUNNEL	false	If set, expose individual pastes to the public internet with Funnel.
-hide-funnel-users	HIDE_FUNNEL_USERS	false	If set, don't display the username and profile picture of the user who created the paste in funneled pastes.
-http-port	HTTP_PORT	unset	If set, expose individual pastes on a HTTP server running on the given port.
-control-url	TSNET_CONTROL_URL	unset	If set, a custom control server to use, e.g. for Headscale users.
-disable-https	DISABLE_HTTPS	false	If set, disable serving on HTTPS with Serve. Useful for Headscale deployments.
-enable-line-numbers	ENABLE_LINE_NUMBERS	false	If set, enable line numbers being shown when viewing a paste.
-enable-word-wrap	ENABLE_WORD_WRAP	false	If set, allows lines to break and wrap to the following line.

Deploying

There are several options you can take to deploy tclip. The most basic deployment method is to use fly.io, but we offer a few options so that you can make the decision that is right for you.

Prerequisites

In order to deploy this service, you will need to get an authkey from the admin panel. It is a good idea to associate this with the tag tag:service or its own tag:tclip. Please also do not set the ephemeral tag as that will destroy the node when the service shuts down.

Your authkey should start with tskey-auth.

You will need to have Magic DNS enabled.

fly.io

In one of your infrastructure management GitHub repositories, create a folder for tclip and then copy the following fly.toml template into that folder.

app = "FLY_APP_NAME"

[build]
image = "ghcr.io/tailscale-dev/tclip:latest"

[deploy]
strategy = "immediate"

[env]
DATA_DIR = "/data"

[mounts]
source = "tclip_data"
destination = "/data"

Replace FLY_APP_NAME with a name such as yourorg-tclip and then run these commands with the flyctl command:

$ flyctl apps create FLY_APP_NAME
$ flyctl volumes create tclip_data
$ flyctl secrets set TS_AUTHKEY=<key>
$ flyctl deploy

You should be able to open the app at http://paste and paste to your heart's content.

Updating

Run flyctl deploy to update the service.

Normal Docker

To run this service in Docker, run the following command:

docker run \
  -d \
  -v /var/lib/tclip:/data \
  -e DATA_DIR=/data \
  -e TS_AUTHKEY=<key> \
  -n tclip \
  --restart always \
  ghcr.io/tailscale-dev/tclip:latest

Updating

Every so often you should pull a new version of tclip and recreate the container:

docker pull ghcr.io/tailscale-dev/tclip:latest
docker rm -f tclip

Then run the above command to recreate the container.

Backups

Add the path /var/lib/tclip to your backup program of choice.

Systemd portable service

systemd has a mechanism for portable service which are like Docker images mixed with systemd unit configurations. This allows you to install tclip on any Linux distribution with systemd (and the portablectl command, install systemd-container to get this package on Ubuntu). This lets you view tclip logs with journalctl and manage it like any other systemd service.

You can download the portable service image from CI by looking at the recently finished builds, clicking on the most recent one, and downloading the portable-service artifact. This will get you a zipfile that contains a single .raw file. Copy this .raw file to /var/lib/portable on your target server. Then run portablectl list to get a list of available portable services:

$ portablectl list
NAME                       TYPE RO  CRTIME                      MTIME                       USAGE STATE
tclip_0.1.0-20230116 raw  yes Mon 2023-01-16 16:49:58 UTC Mon 2023-01-16 16:53:59 UTC 14.8M detached

Copy the name of the tclip service including the auto-generated version number to your clipboard (for example: tclip_0.1.0-20230116) and pass that to portablectl attach:

$ sudo portablectl attach tclip_0.1.0-20230116

Next, create the folder /etc/systemd/system/tclip.service.d and create the file 10-ts-auth-key.conf in it with the following contents (be sure to replace <key> with your tailnet authkey):

# /etc/systemd/system/tclip.service.d/10-ts-authkey.conf
[Service]
Environment=TS_AUTHKEY=<key>

Finally, enable tclip.service and start it with systemctl enable --now:

$ sudo systemctl enable --now tclip.service

Wait a moment for it to connect to Tailscale and then check on it with tailscale status. Your new node named paste should show up in your tailnet.

Updating

To update tclip, first detach the portable service using portablectl detach after finding the list with portablectl list. Then delete the correlating .raw file in /var/lib/portables. Download a new one in its place and re-attach and re-enable the service.

Backups

Add the path /var/lib/private/tclip to your backup program of choice.