MacOS Tailscale autostart before login

Tailscale user:
My Team is using Tailscale extensively and we are happy with the performance, however there is one corner case that is a major blocker.

We have a number of macOS machines running unattended (pipelines/testing) and it seems that Tailscale service is not up until user logins into the session, therefore machine is not available on the VPN unless the user logs in.
Is there a solution for this?

Support:
The App Store version of Tailscale doesn’t support this (it’s a limitation of App Store apps, from what we understand).

But the open source version apparently supports the mode you want. Some people are working on that in https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/177 for Homebrew. But if you just want to build tailscaled and write a launchd config for it, it should work fine. We haven’t polished up that use case for macOS yet, but we might be able to help if you hit problems, though!

Tailscaled on macOS is now also an option:

1 Like

May I suggest a preference to allow the user to specify an automatic login to be done when the app starts. That would seem to simplify the process without requiring the Homebrew solution.

…just a suggestion…
TomB

Hello Tom,

Indeed it’s a good suggestion, we already have a GitHub issue created for this feature #987, which you can subscribe to it to receive future updates.

We have this feature supported on Linux by default, and Windows has an option to enable: Run Attended.

Thank you,

Hi there,
have anyone finished their launchd config? Could you share?

Updated, found a solution

curl "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dzianisv/554cc93fdb072acb4eb9ed9f672ace85/raw/80e2e2710c143e1c891a0085c10ec1c03f5531ed/install.sh" | bash