YawLabs/tailscale-mcp

One click adds this to your local Yaw MCP config so it's available in every Yaw Terminal session. Or install manually below.
**Ask your agent questions about your tailnet and have it act on the answers.** 97 admin-API tools + 6 optional local-CLI diagnostics + 1 always-on catalog tool + 4 resources spanning the Tailscale v2 API — devices, ACLs, DNS, keys and trust credentials, users, invites, webhooks, log streaming, posture, services, and organization tailnets. Backed by 1900+ unit tests and an opt-in live-tailnet integration suite.
Built and maintained by Yaw Labs.
What's the point if the API already exists?
You could curl the Tailscale API. The point isn't replacing curl — it's letting an agent compose multi-endpoint workflows in one turn without writing a script:
- **"Which devices haven't checked in for 30 days and have key expiry disabled?"** — lists devices, filters by lastSeen (online devices carry none), filters by keyExpiryDisabled, returns a table. Three endpoints, one question.
- **"Someone broke DNS at 2am — who changed what in the last 24 hours?"** — pulls the audit log, filters by DNS-related actors and endpoints, reads each change's before/after, summarizes in English.
- **"Draft an ACL change that lets tag:mobile reach tag:dashboard but not tag:db, preserving my comments"** — reads the current HuJSON, proposes a minimal diff, validates it against the API, returns the diff for you to apply.
- **"Rotate every auth key older than 90 days and print the new ones"** — iterates, creates new keys with matching tags, revokes the old ones.
- **"Create an OAuth client for our CI pipeline scoped to devices:core:read and dns:read"** — creates a trust credential via tailscale_create_key with keyType=client, returns the credentials once (save them immediately).
A curl can do each step. The agent composes them. That's where the lift is, and that's what the tool surface is designed for — every read endpoint is first-class so the agent can synthesize, and every write endpoint is tagged destructiveHint or idempotentHint so your MCP client can gate mutations the way you configured it.
If all you need is one endpoint in a CI job, use curl — we even have a CLI subcommand for the common ACL-from-git case. The MCP is for the interactive, exploratory, "I don't know what I need yet" work.
Why MCP vs. a skill or the tailscale CLI?
Reasonable question. Both have their place. Where this MCP is better:
- **Broad admin API coverage.** The tailscale CLI is scoped to the node it runs on. Admin concerns — ACLs, users, invites, webhooks, log streaming, posture integrations, auth keys, OAuth clients, and federated identities — live in the v2 HTTP API. You'd be shelling out to curl anyway.
- **Typed tool surface, not string parsing.** Every tool has a Zod-validated input schema and a structured response. No brittle tailscale status --json | jq pipelines that break when the schema evolves.
- **Cross-client, and updates arrive as a version bump.** An MCP server works in Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, and anything else that speaks MCP; a skill written to the Agent Skills standard travels between agents too, but it is prose you maintain. Version bumps ship through npx — nobody rewrites a skill's instructions when Tailscale adds an endpoint.
- **Safe-by-default writes.** Every tool declares readOnlyHint / destructiveHint / idempotentHint so clients can skip confirmation on reads and require it on mutations. A skill that shells out to the CLI can't express that.
- **Real tests.** 1900+ unit tests covering every tool's input validation, API shape, and error handling. Plus an opt-in live-tailnet integration suite (RUN_INTEGRATION_TESTS=1 + a tailnet API key) for shape-drift detection. Most skills are short markdown prompts without their own test layer — if the vendor changes output format, nothing catches it for you.
If you already have a skill that covers your 10% of Tailscale workflows, great — keep it. The MCP is for the other 90%.
**What about Tailscale's own MCP endpoints and skill?** As of 2026-09-19 they solve different problems, and nothing here duplicates them. Tailscale's official MCP tools are two alpha built-in connectors inside Aperture: *Tailnet*, whose Tailnet_provision_node returns a single-use auth key so an agent can join one new node after a person approves it, and *Tailscale SSH*, whose TailnetSSH_list_machines and TailnetSSH_run_command discover SSH-enabled machines and run one command on one of them. They require Aperture. tailscale/tailscale-skill is an alpha, knowledge-only skill — reference material that teaches an agent to curl the v2 API, with no server of its own. Neither exposes the admin API as typed tools, so the overlap with this server is close to nil. Nor can Aperture front this one today: this server speaks stdio, and Aperture proxies only URL-addressable Streamable-HTTP or SSE servers. Both of those products are alpha, so treat the date on this paragraph as its expiry.