isabella232 / docker-extension

Docker Desktop extension adding Tailscale networking.

Tailscale Docker Extension

This repository hosts the code for Tailscale's Docker extension. The extension lets Docker users expose public ports from their local containers onto their Tailscale network.

Developing

⚠️ Docker extensions are still in active development, and this information may change as it gets closer to release.

To get started with Docker Extensions you will need a specific Docker Desktop build that comes with extension capabilities and the Extensions CLI.

Install the following:

• A custom build of Docker Desktop with support for extensions
• An extension to the Docker CLI
• A local install of Node (v16.13.1 at the time of writing)
• A local install of yarn (v1.22.17 at the time of writing)

Setting up

Once you have all the prerequisite pieces installed, enable the extension beta.

docker extension enable

Next, build and install the extension Docker container:

make install-extension

Navigate to Docker Desktop, and you should now see a new "Tailscale" section in the sidebar menu.

Developing the extension backend

Any changes to the extension metadata or backend will require you to rebuild the extension and install it. You can do both with:

make install-extension

Developing the extension UI

The extension UI is a React app that is statically bundled at build time. However, re-building the Docker container on each change is slow, so we can instead instruct the Docker Desktop app to use a local server to serve the UI instead.

make dev-extension

This will spin up a local server on localhost:3000. Once running, it instructs Docker Desktop to use that server as your extension UI. Changes will be hot reloaded.