Wild Central

Wild Central is a networking platform for your LAN. It manages DNS, proxy routing, TLS certificates, VPN, firewall, and dynamic DNS — providing a unified networking layer for self-hosted services.

What it does

Wild Central runs on a device on your LAN (e.g., a Raspberry Pi) and manages:

• DNS (dnsmasq) — internal name resolution, split DNS, DHCP
• Gateway (HAProxy) — L4 SNI passthrough for k8s clusters, L7 reverse proxy for HTTP services
• TLS (certbot) — certificate provisioning via Let's Encrypt DNS-01
• VPN (WireGuard) — remote access with peer management
• Firewall (nftables) — host firewall rules
• DDNS (Cloudflare) — dynamic DNS A record management
• Security (CrowdSec) — intrusion detection
• NATS JetStream — coordination bus for service registration and events

Two sources of truth

Central state drives Central's own services — its UI domain, VPN, firewall, DHCP. These are managed through Central's web UI and state file.

Service registrations drive external consumer services. Wild Cloud registers its k8s instance domains. Wild Works registers its program services. Each registration is a domain that needs routing through Central's networking stack.

See docs/registrations.md for the full registration API reference.

Quick start

# Install
apt install wild-central

# Start
systemctl enable --now wild-central

# Access the web UI
open http://<device-ip>:5055

Development

make dev    # Run with live reloading (requires air)
make build  # Build binary
make test   # Run tests
make check  # Lint + test

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
WILD_CENTRAL_ENV	—	Set to development for dev mode (Vite proxy)
WILD_CENTRAL_DATA_DIR	/var/lib/wild-central	Data directory
WILD_CENTRAL_PORT	5055	API listen port
WILD_CENTRAL_NATS_PORT	4222	NATS JetStream port
WILD_CENTRAL_VITE_URL	http://localhost:5173	Vite dev server URL

Architecture

Wild Central (this service)
├── Config-driven: DNS, VPN, firewall, DHCP, TLS for Central's own domain
├── Registration-driven: DNS, proxy, TLS, DDNS for consumer domains
├── NATS JetStream: coordination bus
└── Web UI: management interface

Wild Cloud ──registers domains──→ Wild Central
Wild Works ──registers domains──→ Wild Central

Wild Cloud and Wild Works are separate services that register their domains with Central. Central handles all the networking — DNS resolution, proxy routing, TLS certificates, and external DNS records.