Getting Started#

Welcome to the ownscale documentation.

ownscale is a self-hosted control plane and web console for Headscale, an open-source implementation of the Tailscale coordination server. This section covers the core concepts you’ll run into once ownscale is installed; head to Installation first if you haven’t deployed it yet.

Organizations#

Each organization is an independent tailnet, backed by its own Headscale instance and reachable at its own subdomain (e.g. acme.<base_domain>). Users, machines, ACLs, and DNS settings are all scoped to a single organization.

Single sign-on#

ownscale federates login to a configurable upstream OIDC provider (Google, Okta, a self-hosted Dex instance, etc. – see OWNSCALE_AUTH_UPSTREAM_OIDC_*) and exposes its own OIDC provider at the console subdomain (https://console.<base-domain>, where the Ownscale console and login also live) for each organization’s Headscale containers. This documentation site itself lives at the bare <base-domain>. You sign in with the upstream provider once, then downstream admin surfaces can reuse that ownscale session for single sign-on.

Next steps#

  • Not installed yet? See Installation for prerequisites and a Docker Compose quick start.
  • Already running? Sign in at https://console.<base_domain>/login to create your first organization, invite users, and manage machines, ACLs, and DNS.
  • See the FAQs for answers to common questions.
  • Add more pages under content/docs/, and rebuild this site with make docs from the repository root whenever you change content, then commit the regenerated etc/caddy/site/ output.
Installation Forward