Community — OpenVLAN

The forum is indexed; Discord is not

Searchable answers compound — that's why the forum, not chat, is the canonical place for "has anyone seen this." The best threads get distilled into KB articles with the author credited, and Google does the rest.

✓Forum answers stay findable for the next person with the problem
✓Discord for real-time debugging and show-your-tailnet
✓GitHub for code — issues and PRs, where fixes live

picking the right channel

"has anyone seen..."searchable, canonicalforumASK HERE

"stuck right now"real-time back-and-forthdiscordCHAT

"found a bug"issue + repro stepsgithubREPO

"here's a patch"we love you alreadyPRMERGED?

Best answers graduate into the KB

When a forum thread settles into something durable, an editor distills it into a knowledge-base article — with the original discussion linked. Answer well once and you've answered for everyone who searches it afterward.

# the thread → article pipeline

thread " captive portal at hotel, mesh survives?"

→ 17 replies, 3 configs, 1 verdict

distill kb: captive-portals-and-the-mesh

→ credit: @night-desk-ops

result next searcher: 30 seconds, done

Where people hang out

💬

Forum

Q&A that stays searchable. The best answers become KB articles.

Knowledge base →

📺

Discord

Real-time help, show-your-tailnet channels, and the occasional 2am NAT question.

🐙

GitHub

Clients, operator, Terraform provider — issues and PRs welcome.

Repos →

Community projects

Tools built by users, loved by us.

mesh-pi

Turn any Raspberry Pi into a subnet router appliance with a web UI. Homelab favorite.

Homelab →

openvlan-exporter

Prometheus metrics for node status, relay ratios, and ACL hits.

Monitoring integrations →

ts-map

Interactive map of your tailnet — peers, direct vs. relayed, latencies.

funnel-check

Linter for funnel configs; catches accidentally-public services.

Funnel use case →

key-butler

Rotation automation for fleet auth keys, with expiry alerts.

Fleets →

dns-sync

Sync MagicDNS names into your internal zone for hybrid estates.

Programs

Insiders program

Early builds and a direct line to the product team.

Startup program

Free Premium for eligible young companies.

Open source plans

Free Premium for maintaining public projects.

Community FAQs

Do OpenVLAN engineers actually hang out here?

Yes, on rotation — every engineer spends a week in the forum and Discord every quarter, answering questions in their area. It's the same people who write the changelog, which is why feature requests in the forum get real answers, not link dumps.

What's the code of conduct?

Be useful, be decent. Technical disagreement is the point of the forum; personal attacks, self-promo spam, and "RTFM" replies to sincere questions are not. It's enforced — the moderators' ban log is public.

Can I promote my project here?

If it's OpenVLAN-related, absolutely — the community projects grid above grew from forum posts. If it's unrelated commercial promotion, no. The test: would a tailnet user find this useful? If yes, post it; if it's only useful to your sales funnel, don't.

Is there a homelab corner?

A loud one. The homelab tag covers the Raspberry-Pi-subnet-router crowd, and several community tools in the grid above were born there. Homelabbers break edge cases before enterprises hit them — we read that tag religiously.

How do community projects get featured?

They get used. The grid rotates based on forum mentions, GitHub activity, and "this tool saved me" posts. No application process — build something useful, tag it, and if the community picks it up, it ends up on this page.

Built with the community