tailscaled on macOS

There are multiple ways to use Tailscale on macOS.

This page is about how to use the open source, non-GUI tailscaled and tailscale binaries.

Requirements

Install Go

Install Go 1.21 (or whatever the most recently released Go version is) from https://golang.org/dl/ or Homebrew, etc. Tailscale always requires the most recent Go version and doesn't support older ones.

Compile Tailscale

Run:

go install tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale{,d}@main

That'll put the binaries in $(go env GOPATH)/bin, so likely $HOME/go/bin. You can copy or symlink those binaries into your $PATH, or make your $PATH include that directory.

You can also compile from a specific release version. For example to build from the source code used for Tailscale 1.38.2, use:

go install tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale{,d}@v1.38.2

Run the `tailscaled` (daemon)

sudo $HOME/go/bin/tailscaled

Or, to run it in the background under launchd so it starts at system boot:

sudo $HOME/go/bin/tailscaled install-system-daemon

That copies the binary to /usr/local/bin and installs a plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.tailscale.tailscaled.plist and starts com.tailscale.tailscaled.

(to stop/uninstall, use: sudo tailscaled uninstall-system-daemon)

Use the `tailscale` CLI tool

See https://tailscale.com/kb/1080/cli (but ignore the /Applications/Tailscale.app/Contents/MacOS/Tailscale part; that's the path to the GUI's CLI)

tailscale up       # (any optional arguments)
tailscale status

Enjoy.

Comparison to GUI version

Compared to the GUI version of Tailscale, running tailscaled instead has the following differences:

tailscaled on macOS is much newer and less tested, but it seems to all work.
the App Store version uses the Apple Network Extension API; tailscaled uses the /dev/utun TUN interface
MagicDNS works, but you need to set 100.100.100.100 as your DNS server yourself. It doesn't yet change your DNS config.
tailscaled can run at system boot before any user has logged in (e.g. letting you VNC to your computer after a power outage)
is fully open source (Tailscale GUI parts aren't open source on non-free operating systems)