Self-hosting an Exit Node

First, you’ll need a machine where you can run Chisel, the software that Chisel Operator uses to tunnel to your server. We assume that you’re running a Linux distribution with systemd.

To install Chisel, you can use your distribution’s Chisel package or the official install script. For the sake of this guide, we’ll be using the install script:

curl https://i.jpillora.com/chisel! | bash

You’ll probably want to make a systemd service to manage the Chisel process. On the system, you can create a file called /etc/systemd/system/chisel.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Chisel Tunnel
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=root
# You can add any additional flags here
# This example uses port 9090 for the tunnel socket. `--reverse` is required for our use case.
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/chisel server --port=9090 --reverse
# Additional .env file for auth and secrets
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/chisel

You’ll also need to setup authentication for your Chisel instance. For the above systemd service, this is done in the /etc/sysconfig/chisel file:

# This is the root credentials for the Chisel server. You can change this to whatever you want. Just make sure to keep it a secret.
# You can also use the `--authfile` argument in the ExecStart command instead of this, for a custom ACL file (in JSON).
AUTH=user:password

Then run systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl enable --now chisel.service to enable and start the service. The Chisel server will be accessible on all addresses on port 9000, although, you may need to configure your firewall settings to allow this.

Now, we can finally let Chisel Operator know about our exit node, by creating a corresponding ExitNode resource:

apiVersion: chisel-operator.io/v1
kind: ExitNode
metadata:
  name: my-exit-node
  namespace: default
spec:
  # IP address of exit node
  host: "192.168.1.1" # Set to the public IP of your exit node!
  # Control plane socket port
  port: 9090
  # Name of the secret containing the auth key
  # Create a secret with a key named "auth" and put the value there
  auth: my-exit-node-secret

We’ll also need to create a secret with our credentials:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: my-exit-node-secret
  namespace: default
type: Opaque
stringData:
  auth: user:password

And congratulations, you’re ready to start tunneling services! That wasn’t too hard, was it?