Authenticating Tailscale non-interactively via API with sops-nix

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:01:12 +0200

For the past three years I’ve connected my Nix machines using Tailscale by running sudo tailscale login once per machine.

I’ve known that you can actually log onto a Tailnet with an API key.

Why bother? Running sudo tailscale login takes ten seconds, your browser’s password manager kicks in, you’re done.

This is actually simple and ships almost out of the box, if you already have sops-nix secrets management in your system configuration.

Tailscale on Simon Shine