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/web or go run ./cmd/tclip as appropriate.

Note that for the first run of ./cmd/web, 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 .#web

The docker image:

nix build .#docker
docker load < ./result

The portable service image:

nix build .#portable-service

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.