Tailscale setup

Tailscale is how we recommend exposing a self-hosted Gray to your phone. It’s free for personal use, takes 5 minutes, and gives you a real HTTPS URL that only your devices can reach.

Today, self-hosted Gray requires Tailscale. We plan to support Cloudflare Tunnel, WireGuard, and existing VPNs later, but v1 is Tailscale-only.

On the server

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo tailscale up

Sign in with the account you’ll use on your phone.

On your phone

Install the Tailscale app. Sign in with the same account.

Enable MagicDNS and HTTPS

In the Tailscale admin console:

1. Enable MagicDNS.
2. Enable HTTPS Certificates.

Now your server has a https://<host>.<tailnet>.ts.net URL that resolves on every device in your tailnet — including your phone.

If you used the Ubuntu installer

sudo ./install.sh does all of this for you and prints the final URL.

Connect Gray

Open the native app → Settings → I run my own instance → paste your tailnet URL.

Troubleshooting

• tailscale serve failed — enable HTTPS Certificates and MagicDNS in the admin console, then re-run the printed command.
• Port 443 busy — re-run with --https-port 8443.
• Can’t reach from phone — check the Tailscale app is on and signed into the same account. Tap the server in your machine list.