This documentation has the goal of showing how a user can use the official Windows Tailscale client with headscale.
Download the Official Windows Client and install it.
!!! info "Instructions on your headscale instance"
An endpoint with information on how to connect your Windows device
is also available at `/windows` on your running instance.
Open a Command Prompt or Powershell and use Tailscale's login command to connect with your headscale instance (e.g
https://headscale.example.com):
tailscale login --login-server <YOUR_HEADSCALE_URL>
Follow the instructions in the opened browser window to finish the configuration.
By default, Tailscale's Windows client is only running when the user is logged in. If you want to keep Tailscale running all the time, please enable "Unattended mode":
- Click on the Tailscale tray icon and select
Preferences - Enable
Run unattended - Confirm the "Unattended mode" message
See also Keep Tailscale running when I'm not logged in to my computer
If you are seeing repeated messages like:
[GIN] 2022/02/10 - 16:39:34 | 200 | 1.105306ms | 127.0.0.1 | POST "/machine/redacted"
in your headscale output, turn on DEBUG logging and look for:
2022-02-11T00:59:29Z DBG Machine registration has expired. Sending a authurl to register machine=redacted
This typically means that the registry keys above was not set appropriately.
To reset and try again, it is important to do the following:
- Shut down the Tailscale service (or the client running in the tray)
- Delete Tailscale Application data folder, located at
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Tailscaleand try to connect again. - Ensure the Windows node is deleted from headscale (to ensure fresh setup)
- Start Tailscale on the Windows machine and retry the login.