Installing Tailscale With Ansible

Blog Post Software Engineering

Tailscale Introduction

I recently found out about Tailscale ^{1 1}https://tailscale.com/ from the Level1Tech’s interview with its CEO Avery Pennarun. After trying it out, I can say that I am more than satisfied with its performance, ease of use, and ability to network all of my devices together across different intranets.

Level1Tech’s interview with its CEO Avery Pennarun’

As someone who prefers to configure their computer using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices, I decided to write an Ansible ^{2 2}https://docs.ansible.com/ play for installing Tailscale. The following is the play that I created:

Ansible play to install Tailscale

- name: Install Tailscale
hosts: myhosts
become: true
tasks:
   - name: Download Tailscale GPG Key
      ansible.builtin.uri:
      dest: /usr/share/keyrings/tailscale-archive-keyring.gpg
      url: https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/ubuntu/jammy.noarmor.gpg

   - name: Add Tailscale repository
      ansible.builtin.uri:
      dest: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list
      url: https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/ubuntu/jammy.tailscale-keyring.list

   - name: Install Tailscale
      ansible.builtin.apt:
      name: tailscale
      update_cache: true
      state: present

This play is my attempt at a direct translation from the Tailscale download instructions ^{3 3}https://tailscale.com/download/linux.