Trayscale

Trayscale is an unofficial GUI interface for the Tailscale daemon particularly for use on Linux, as no official Linux GUI client exists. It provides a basic system tray icon and a fairly comprehensive UI with support for many of Tailscale's features.

Disclaimer: This project is in a beta state. There may still be undiscovered bugs or compatibility issues. Use at your own risk.

Tailscale Config

Trayscale interfaces with the Tailscale daemon, tailscaled, to perform many of its operations. In order for this to work, the daemon must have been configured with the current user as the "operator". To do this, run sudo tailscale set --operator=$USER from the command-line at least once manually.

Installation

Note that the above config note about the current user being designated as an "operator" still applies to the Flatpak version of this app. However, the tailscale client is bundled into the Flatpak and thus does not need to be in your $PATH.

AUR

If you are on Arch Linux or a derivative, Trayscale is available from the AUR.

Manual

First, make sure that you have dependencies installed:

• Go >= 1.24
• GTK >= 4.0
• Libadwaita >= 1.6

The main Trayscale binary can be installed with go install:

$ go install deedles.dev/trayscale/cmd/trayscale@latest

If you would like, you can also copy the .desktop file, the icon, and other pieces of extra metadata into the places that they need to be put to function properly:

• dev.deedles-trayscale.desktop -> $HOME/.local/share/applications/
• dev.deedles.Trayscale.png -> $HOME/.local/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/

Note that without copying both of these files into the correct locations, notifications will likely not function correctly in GNOME. Also keep in mind that if the trayscale binary is not in your $PATH in a way that the desktop environment can locate then the .desktop file will not be considered valid. If this is an issue, modify the file manually and change the Exec= line to point directly to the binary with an absolute path.

macOS

First of all, please note that macOS support is not maintained or tested by the primary developer of Trayscale. Also note that the tray icon will not work in macOS.

The simplest way to install Trayscale on macOS is via Nixpkgs' unstable channel. Note that it will need to be built from source if a binary cache is unavailable and the build can take some time.

To build it locally without Nix, first make sure that you have installed the Go compiler, as well as necessary dependencies. The dependencies are available as the following Homebrew packages: * libadwaita * gtk4 * gobject-introspection * harfbuzz

Then, run the following in the root of the repository:

$ ./dist.sh build
$ ./dist.sh install-macos

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