Riccardo Manfrin
85db35194e
* [client] Do not move an HA route on latency before both peers have a sample A direct connection reports no latency until the first sample of its new ICE agent, and a drop to relay clears the previous one. Route selection ranked such a peer at unknownLatency, so a routing peer whose direct connection came back within the relayed switch delay lost the route to an equivalent peer on a "lower latency" switch right after recovering, resetting every masqueraded flow the delay was meant to keep alive. The sample usually lands before the evaluation, but nothing orders the two, and a pair with no round trip time yet postpones it to the next sampling tick. Latency-only switches now require a sample on both peers. Categorical criteria (connected, metric, direct versus relayed) are unaffected. * [client] Hold a never-direct HA routing peer before a direct peer takes over The peers of an HA group come up over relay first and turn direct one after the other, as when lazy connections wake the group or the client reconnects. A routing peer that was relayed when it carried the route gave way at once to the first equivalent peer that turned direct, so in a group of N peers the route moved right after the session started in roughly (N-1)/N of the cases, resetting every masqueraded flow, typically an SSH session opened on the wake-up traffic. Such a peer is now kept for the relayedSwitch delay, counted from the first evaluation that finds a direct contender. If it turns direct within the delay the route stays; otherwise it moves when the delay runs out, so the route does not stay on a relay for longer than the delay. A peer that dropped from direct keeps counting from the drop. * [client] Keep allowed IPs when only the chosen routing peer's status changes recalculateRoutes did not tell a status change of the chosen routing peer (idle to connected when traffic wakes it, connected to relayed and back) from a switch to another peer: it removed the allowed IPs and added them back on the same peer. In between the prefix had no owner and packets for it were dropped, and default routes published a spurious "disconnected due to high availability change" event followed by two "connected" ones. When the same route stays on the same peer with the same definition, only the recorded status is updated now. * [client] Limit the "never" relayed switch policy to peers that dropped from direct NB_HA_RELAYED_SWITCH_DELAY=never keeps a routing peer whose direct connection dropped to relay for as long as it stays connected. Once the relayed delay also covered peers that were never direct, "never" pinned those to the relay for good, although a direct equivalent was available and the peer showed no sign of turning direct. A peer that was never direct now uses the default delay under "never", which keeps the policy's original scope. * [client] Merge the unchanged-route checks of the HA route watcher shouldSkipRecalculation and the status-only fast path in recalculateRoutes both handled the same route staying on the same routing peer, one for an unchanged status and one for a changed one. They are now a single keepChosenRoute check. Pure refactor, no behavior change. * [client] Re-apply routed allowed IPs when a kept routing peer connects A peer update can recreate a routing peer: modifyPeers removes it from the interface, which drops its routed prefixes, and adds it back idle with its overlay addresses only. The remove and re-add that recalculateRoutes used to run on every status change of the chosen peer put the prefixes back as a side effect once the peer connected. Without it, a watcher that sees the same peer go idle and then connected leaves the routed subnet without an owner until a route update or an HA switch. When the chosen peer connects while keeping the route, the watcher now re-applies its routed allowed IPs through the route manager's reconcile, which is add-only and idempotent. Lazy connections already do the same when they arm an idle peer. * [client] Bound the HA route hold on a routing peer without a latency sample A latency-only switch waited for a sample on both peers. If the current peer never got one, because its candidate pair stats kept failing or reporting no round trip time, it kept the route indefinitely against a measured peer, however much faster that one was. The hold on an unsampled current peer now lasts unmeasuredLatencyHold (30s), long enough for a recovered direct connection to report its first sample. After that the peer is ranked at unknownLatency again and the usual switch margins apply. relayedHold is armed so the switch is reconsidered when the hold runs out. * [client] Restart the relayed delay of a never-direct peer when its contender goes For a routing peer that was never direct, the relayed delay runs from the first evaluation that finds a direct contender. It was only reset when the current peer changed or turned direct, so if that contender went away and another one showed up later, the delay counted from the first one and the new contender took over at once. The delay of such a peer now restarts once no direct contender is left. The delay of a peer that dropped from direct keeps running from the drop. * [client] Retrigger pull request synchronization * [client] Retry a failed routed allowed IPs reconcile on the next evaluation keepChosenRoute recorded the connected status before re-applying the routed allowed IPs and only logged a failed reconcile. Later evaluations then saw an unchanged status and never retried, so a transient AddAllowedIP failure left the recreated routing peer without its routed prefixes until another status transition or a route switch. The status is now recorded only once the reconcile succeeds. A failure leaves the previous status in place, so the next evaluation, at the latest the periodic re-evaluation, sees the change again and retries.
Start using NetBird at netbird.io
See Documentation
Join our Slack channel or our Community forum
🚀 We are hiring! Join us at https://netbird.io/careers
🤖 NetBird Agent Network (Beta)
Identity-aware access control for AI agents — keyless access to LLM APIs and private resources over the encrypted NetBird tunnel. See
agent-network/or read the docs at netbird.ai.
NetBird combines a configuration-free peer-to-peer private network and a centralized access control system in a single platform, making it easy to create secure private networks for your organization or home.
Connect. NetBird creates a WireGuard-based overlay network that automatically connects your machines over an encrypted tunnel, leaving behind the hassle of opening ports, complex firewall rules, VPN gateways, and so forth.
Secure. NetBird enables secure remote access by applying granular access policies while allowing you to manage them intuitively from a single place. Works universally on any infrastructure.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/10cec749-bb56-4ab3-97af-4e38850108d2
Self-host NetBird (video)
Key features
Quickstart with NetBird Cloud
- Download and install NetBird at https://app.netbird.io/install.
- Follow the steps to sign up with Google, Microsoft, GitHub or your email address.
- Check the NetBird admin UI.
Quickstart with self-hosted NetBird
This is the quickest way to try self-hosted NetBird. It should take around 5 minutes to get started if you already have a public domain and a VM. Follow the Advanced guide with a custom identity provider for installations with different IdPs.
Infrastructure requirements:
- A Linux VM with at least 1 CPU and 2 GB of memory.
- The VM should be publicly accessible on TCP ports 80 and 443 and UDP port 3478.
- A public domain name pointing to the VM.
Software requirements:
- Docker with the Compose plugin (Compose v2 or higher). See the Docker installation guide.
Steps
- Download and run the installation script:
export NETBIRD_DOMAIN=netbird.example.com; curl -fsSL https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/releases/latest/download/getting-started.sh | bash
A bit on NetBird internals
- Every machine in the network runs the NetBird agent, which manages WireGuard.
- Every agent connects to the Management Service, which holds network state, manages peer IPs, and distributes updates to agents.
- Agents use ICE (via pion/ice) to discover connection candidates for peer-to-peer connections.
- Candidates are discovered with the help of STUN servers.
- Agents negotiate a connection through the Signal Service, exchanging end-to-end encrypted messages with candidates.
- When NAT traversal fails (e.g. mobile carrier-grade NAT) and a direct p2p connection isn't possible, the system falls back to a Relay Service and a secure WireGuard tunnel is established through it.
See a complete architecture overview for details.
Reporting bugs and requesting features
NetBird uses a discussion-first workflow. Bug reports and feature requests start in Discussions, not as issues.
| What you want to do | Where to go |
|---|---|
| Report a bug, regression, or unexpected behavior | Issue Triage |
| Request a feature or share an idea | Ideas & Feature Requests |
| Ask about setup, configuration, or self-hosting | Q&A / Support |
| Report a security vulnerability | Security policy, never a public thread |
Our team and maintainers triage discussions, ask follow-up questions, check for duplicates, and reproduce bugs. Validated reports are promoted to issues. This keeps the issue tracker a clear answer to one question: what is the team working on.
Please search existing discussions and issues first, including closed ones. If something similar already exists, upvote it and add your details there instead of opening a duplicate.
For bug reports, include your NetBird version, operating system, deployment type (Cloud, self-hosted, Kubernetes, or Docker), reproduction steps, expected and actual behavior, and a debug bundle where relevant:
netbird version
netbird status -d -A
netbird debug for 1m -A -S -U
-U uploads the bundle and prints a file key you can paste instead of attaching the archive.
-A anonymizes the output, which matters on a public thread. It masks most identifying details
but is not full redaction, so read the bundle before posting it. Two levels are available:
| Level | How to select | What it masks |
|---|---|---|
default |
-A / --anonymize |
Public IP addresses, IPv6 ULA addresses, MAC addresses, and domains other than netbird.io, netbird.cloud, netbird.selfhosted, and netbird.stage. IPv4 private, CGNAT, and link-local ranges are kept |
strict |
--anonymize-level strict (implies -A) |
The above, plus IPv4 private, CGNAT, and link-local ranges, peer names in front of netbird.cloud, netbird.selfhosted, and netbird.stage, and WireGuard public keys. Labels under netbird.io are kept, since it only hosts infrastructure |
See collecting a debug bundle and the CLI reference for details.
See How to use Discussions, Issues, and Pull Requests for the full workflow, or SUPPORT.md for a shorter version.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md first. NetBird works ticket first, anything that changes behavior needs an issue the team has agreed on before you open a pull request.
Community projects
- NetBird installer script
- netbird-tui - terminal UI for managing NetBird peers, routes, and settings
- caddy-netbird - Caddy plugin that embeds a NetBird client for proxying HTTP and TCP/UDP traffic through NetBird networks
Note: The main branch may be in an unstable or even broken state during development.
For stable versions, see releases.
Support acknowledgement
In November 2022, NetBird joined the StartUpSecure program sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of the Federal Republic of Germany. Together with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, NetBird brings security best practices and simplicity to private networking.
Acknowledgements
We build on open source technologies like WireGuard®, Pion ICE, and Rosenpass. We greatly appreciate the work these projects are doing, and we'd love it if you could support them too (e.g., by starring or contributing).
Legal
This repository is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license, which applies to all parts of the repository except for the directories management/, signal/ and relay/. Those directories are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3). See the respective LICENSE files inside each directory.
WireGuard and the WireGuard logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.