FlitVPN

FlitVPN is a simple, low-cost solution to extend your Tailscale network to operate as an international VPN.

By temporarily deploying Tailscale exit nodes on cloud infrastructure, FlitVPN allows you to route traffic through regions outside your local network. This setup is ideal for routing traffic through, and accessing content from, different geographic locations—without the commitment of a third-party VPN subscription.

For now, FlitVPN only supports deploying nodes to DigitalOcean.

Usage

Routing traffic is as simple as running

flit up <region>

and selecting the newly created exit node in your Tailscale client.

Once you're done, deselect the exit node in your Tailscale client and run

flit down

to remove the Tailscale node and avoid ongoing charges from your cloud provider. For many cases of light personal use, your usage may even fall within your provider's free tier limit, costing you nothing at all!

To get started, run

flit login

and enter a DigitalOcean personal access token and a Tailscale auth key and you're ready to go!

Completions

To load completions:

Bash

source < (flit completion bash)

To load completions for each session, execute once:

# Linux
flit completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/flit-vpn

# macOS
flit completion bash > $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/flit-vpn

Zsh

To load completions for each session, execute once:

flit completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_%[1]s"

Fish

flit completion fish | source

To load completions for each session, execute once:

flit completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/flit-vpn.fish

PowerShell

PS> flit completion powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression

To load completions for every new session, run:

PS> flit completion powershell > flit-vpn.ps1

and source this file from your PowerShell profile.

Possible Future Features

• Other cloud providers for node deployment
• Environment variables for authentication tokens, enabling use in scripting environments
• Support for more than one exit node

A note on third party VPNs

High quality VPN providers absolutely have their advantages, and FlitVPN isn't necessarily designed as a replacement for these. However if you're already a Tailscale user and are looking for a simple, low cost way to occasionally route your traffic around the world, FlitVPN might be worth a try!