tailscale/tailcat

like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane, without Tailscale's control plane

DevOps & infrastructureGo

2.1 Cooling Magnitude out of 10. Star growth looks organic. Data as of September 18, 2026.

About the project

A CLI and Go library that works like netcat over Tailscale's data plane (magicsock/WireGuard) without the control plane: one side listens and prints a short address, the other connects to it, with connection metadata exchanged out of band. Needs no Tailscale account or root access.

Useful for

Pipe stdin/stdout between two machines over an encrypted WireGuard tunnel without setting up Tailscale
Expose a local TCP port (e.g. 8080) to a remote machine with tailcat serve and tailcat forward
Open a web server behind a tailcat server in a browser via tailcat browse

README summarized by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Details may be inaccurate.

Why it’s trending

30 stars so far today, about 36 expected by the end of the day.
Interest is fading: the two-day pace is 37% of the previous week and a half.
About 6 forks a day — people are taking the code.

Stars per day

Bars are daily stars, the line is the usual pace. Red marks spike days.

Numbers

Total stars: 7,444
Stars in a day: 36
Forks: 310
Issues and pull requests: 125
Watchers: 26
Language: Go
License: BSD-3-Clause
Latest release: v0.6.0 · September 4, 2026
Created: October 29, 2024
Last push: September 18, 2026

Star trust

Growth looks organic: forks and discussion are in line with active projects, and stars arrive unevenly, the way people give them.

These are heuristics, not a verdict: we judge by the repository’s behavior, not by a list of stargazers.

Spotted in

September 18, 2026GitHub Trending Go today: #8, +165 stars
September 17, 2026GitHub Trending Go today: #7, +165 stars
September 16, 2026GitHub Trending Go today: #7, +144 stars

README badge

Paste it into your README — the badge shows the current magnitude and links to this page.

[![Seismograph](https://gitnova.dev/badge/tailscale/tailcat.svg?lang=en)](https://gitnova.dev/en/r/tailscale/tailcat)

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