Twingate is a central, Zero Trust orchestration layer. What it means is that it allows you to connect to your internal network - your entire homelab - from anywhere.
There are multiple competitors in this space, like Tailscale, Netbird, ZeroTier, or simply WireGuard.
Installation
For Twingate to work, first you need to sign up on their website and set up a network, initially with a URL ending with .twingate.com.
Next, you need to create a resource. In my case it’s a wildcard domain for my homelab - *.l4n.io.
Next, you need to have so called connectors - ideally more than one - which are essentially the clients that keep the connectivity up and running on the Twingate network.
Twingate will provide some random names, don’t worry too much about them.
For each connector you need to have a corresponding access token and a refresh token. You can generate them on the Twingate website.
You need to decide on which two servers will each Twingate connector run on. Install them the usual way, let Ansible do the heavy lifting, these are usual Docker containers.
Finally, don’t forget to add the resources to the vault.yml file.
# =============================================================================
# TWINGATE CREDENTIALS
# =============================================================================
vault_twingate_connector_url: "https://<YOUR-TWINGATE-NETWORK-NAME>.twingate.com"
vault_twingate_network_key: "" # Network key not required for connector deployment
vault_twingate_connectors:
- name: "twingate-rpi4-01"
host: "rpi4-01"
log_level: 5
enabled: true
access_token: "<YOUR-ACCESS-TOKEN>"
refresh_token: "<YOUR-REFRESH-TOKEN>"
- name: "twingate-rpi4-02"
host: "rpi4-02"
log_level: 5
enabled: true
access_token: "<YOUR-ACCESS-TOKEN>"
refresh_token: "<YOUR-REFRESH-TOKEN>"Once all this is done, let Ansible run. If all goes well, you should see the Twingate connectors running on both servers.
Traffic
One thing I noticed is that these connectors will generate quite a bit of traffic, even when they just simply run by themselves.
In the logs you will see something like this:
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
[INFO] [connector] processing "health" request
...As you can see, it’s the second most popular entry in my top domains list:
…and that’s it.
From now on, you can access your home lab from anywhere, by just simply connecting to your Twingate network.
To follow along, please regularly check the akora/homelab repository on GitHub for the latest updates.