wgautomesh/README.md

wgautomesh

wgautomesh is a simple utility to help configure a full-mesh wireguard network. It does not assume that all nodes have a publicly reachable address. It uses a gossip protocol to broadcast the endpoint addresses nodes use to talk to one another. This way, even if nodes A and B are not able to communicate directly initially (both behind NAT), if they can both communicate with node C then they will indirectly be able to know each other's NAT-ed address and port. They will then try to connect to one another using those addresses, which should allow NAT hole punching.

Features:

• does not assume all nodes are publicly reachable
• configuration very similar to wg-quick: each node needs a list of the credentials of all other nodes in the mesh
• ultra simple encrypted gossip protocol over UDP (bincode encoding + xsalsa20poly1305 symmetric encryption)
• automatic discovery of nodes in a same LAN using UDP broadcast (if enabled, nodes will prefer connecting to one another using their LAN IP addresses when available)
• can automatically open ports in your router using IGD/UPnP
• saves to disk known addresses of peers so that they can be reused on restart (usefull if all addresses have changed and the ones in the config file are no longer relevant)

Remarks/limitations:

• wgautomesh does not create a wireguard interface, it assumes it exists and merely configures the peers attached to it
• wgautomesh only tries to establish connectivity to the peers specified in its config file, it does not provide facilities for dynamically adding more peers like many wireguard configuration tools do.

wgautomesh was built for Deuxfleurs to integrate with our automated NixOS-based configuration management system. A preliminary NixOS module for wgautomesh can be found here