tailscaled daemon

The Tailscale software that runs on your devices is split across several binaries and processes.

Platform differences

On most platforms, the CLI is a binary named tailscale (or tailscale.exe) and the more privileged daemon that does all the network handling is called tailscaled (or tailscaled.exe). Note the final d for "daemon". The majority of the CLI commands accessible via the tailscale command require that the daemon be running on the machine.

There are three ways to run Tailscale on macOS. Only the third non-GUI way contains the typical tailscale vs tailscaled split. The two GUI variants bundle all components into one binary that macOS loads in different contexts: the GUI, the daemon (named either IPNExtension for the App Store variant or io.tailscale.ipn.macsys.network-extension for the zip file download), and the CLI (which is the same binary as the GUI, but goes into CLI mode when run from a terminal). The daemons for the two macOS GUI variants, despite having different names, are virtually identical. But they're not technically tailscaled, the subject of this article, despite sharing the majority of the same code. Notably, any tailscaled behavior that involves changing flags to tailscaled is not always available on the macOS GUI variants.

Where does tailscaled run?

On Linux and other Unix-like platforms, tailscaled typically runs as a systemd service, or whatever your distro or OS's init system is.

On macOS, tailscaled (when not using a GUI build, as mentioned above) runs as a launchd service.

On Windows, tailscaled runs as a Windows service named "Tailscale".

Stopping and starting tailscaled

You should not normally need to manually stop and start the tailscaled process. It should go into an idle state when you use the CLI command tailscale down. If you're debugging something or changing flags, though, the instructions vary by platform.

On systemd, you can run sudo systemctl $VERB tailscaled, where the verb is one of stop, start, restart, or the like.

On Windows, you can run net stop Tailscale or net start Tailscale, or use the Windows Service Manager.

Getting logs from tailscaled

A portable way to attach to the daemon and stream its logs is to use the CLI and run tailscale debug daemon-logs. That does not currently support getting any retroactive logs, however.

On systemd, you can use journalctl -u tailscaled --since="1 hour ago".

On Windows, see C:\ProgramData\Tailscale\Logs.

On macOS, for the GUI builds, use Console.app and search for Tailscale or IPNExtension.

Flags to tailscaled

tailscaled has a number of flags (command-line arguments) that do various things. Some are not stable interfaces and meant primarily for debugging. Some of the more frequently used and stable ones are:

• --tun=NAME to specify the TUN device name, or userspace-networking as a magic value to not use kernel support and do everything in-process.
• --port=N to set the UDP port to listen on for peer-to-peer traffic; 0 means to auto-select.
• --verbose=N, where N defaults to 0. Values 1 or higher are increasingly verbose.
• --debug=localhost:8080, to run a debug HTTP server serving paths such as /debug/pprof, /debug/metrics, /debug/ipn, or /debug/magicsock. The exact details of what's accessible over the debug server is subject to change over time.
• --no-logs-no-support disables telemetry and opts you out of getting any support that would then require such telemetry for debugging

To control where state (including preferences and keys) is stored, use one of:

• --statedir= for a directory on disk where to store config, keys, Taildrop files, and other state.
• --state= to either a /path/to/file, kube:<secret-name> to use Kubernetes secrets, arn:aws:ssm:... to store state in AWS SSM, or mem: to not store state and reigster as an ephemeral node. By default, if not provided, the state is stored in <statedir>/tailscaled.state.

There are also two flags to run proxies:

• --socks5-server=[host]:port, to run a SOCK5 server, making your tailnet accessible via SOCKS5
• --outbound-http-proxy-listen=[host]:port, to run an HTTP proxy server, making your tailnet accessible via HTTP.

The SOCK5 and HTTP proxy may have the same value in which case only one port is opened but will automatically vary which protocol it speaks based on what the client says first.

The following flags take an action and exit:

• --version prints version info and exists
• --cleanup cleans up system state from a previous run

Setting flags

Setting tailscaled flags varies by platform.

On Linux, you can modify the FLAGS in /etc/default/tailscaled, which the systemd unit definition will include.

Environment variables

Windows

You can set some environment variables on Windows by doing the following:

• Create a tailscaled-env.txt file in C:\ProgramData\Tailscale.
• In the tailscaled-env.txt file you can set PORT=N (for example, to change the default UDP listen port).
• Save the file and run net stop Tailscale, net start Tailscale to apply the changes.