# tailscale/tailcat

> 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.

- Magnitude: 2.0 out of 10 — Cooling
- Stars: 8,714 total · +8 stars measured 2026-11-02, 00:13–23:09 UTC
- Star trust: star growth looks organic
- Category: DevOps & infrastructure · Language: Go · License: BSD-3-Clause · Created: 2024-10-29 · Last push: 2026-10-07
- GitHub: https://github.com/tailscale/tailcat · Homepage: https://tailscale.com/tailcat · Page: https://gitnova.dev/en/r/tailscale/tailcat

## 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

## Why it’s here

- Star-counter measurements on 2026-11-02 (UTC), 00:13–23:09: 8706 → 8714 stars (+8). This is the change over that interval.
- Recent forks include notable developers: @killvxk (1,632 followers), @keysemails (226 followers), @tsingke (208 followers).

## Star trust

Star growth looks organic.

Star-trust labels are heuristics based on the repository’s behavior, not a check of every stargazer.

## Numbers

- Forks: 397
- Issues and pull requests: 158
- Watchers: 26
- Average over the last week: 33 per day
- Usual pace: 19 per day
- Stars in the last hour (measured): 1
- Latest release: v0.7.0 (2026-09-20)

## Stars per day, last 30 days (oldest → newest, today is partial)

2026-10-04 … 2026-11-02: 33, 24, 30, 26, 36, 21, 22, 43, 20, 19, 11, 6, 6, 10, 9, 18, 14, 8, 12, 9, 8, 12, 8, 91, 80, 29, 11, 4, 10, 8

## Magnitude by day, last 14 days

10-07 2.3, 10-08 2.3, 10-09 2.3, 10-10 1.8, 10-11 2.0, 10-12 2.4, 10-13 1.9, 10-14 1.8, 10-15 1.4, 10-29 3.6, 10-30 3.0, 10-31 2.3, 11-01 1.8, 11-02 2.2

## Similar by description

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   A set of scripts and a Codex skill that lets a Codex CLI running on a GPU server (e.g. AutoDL) reach the network through an SSH reverse tunnel to a local HTTP proxy or the local machine's direct network.
   Full card: https://gitnova.dev/en/r/Dushiqi1987/codex-remote-Skill.md

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Magnitude (0–10) measures how fast and how unusually interest in a repository is growing right now. It is not a quality score.
Days are UTC. “So far today” is a fact; “expected by the end of the day” is a forecast.
Summaries and use cases are written by an LLM (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) from the README and may be inaccurate: verify specific claims (benchmarks, speed, hardware) in the repository itself.
Data as of 2026-11-02 23:16 UTC, updated every 30 minutes.