Shane Tobar

Selfhosting T3Code (And not binding to Tailscale)

Homelabbing; selfhost; code; ai; t3
594 words

What is T3Code?

For those unfamiliar 1, the aforementioned T3Code is a custom, perfomant web UI for OpenAI's Codex. The project was created by Ping.gg, the company run by t3dotgg. It's in an early alpha state 2

What's the point of posting this?

I spent too much time on the setup I have now, so we're making it work for what I've done. I blew up my barebones Debian setup for the ever-loved Proxmox, balancing LXCs and VMs. It will remain, and I will be stubborn! After OpenAI doubled its rate limits3 using the Codex desktop app, I started moving my workflow to the desktop version. Naturally, a few issues came up:

  • Performance issues
  • Memory hogging
  • Aimed more for vibe-coders4 or running multiple agents across multiple projects
    • Code diffs prior to write are annoying to view

In an attempt to give these GUI apps a try, it was only right to try the most newest, most hyped one. It's fun to try out the "bleeding edge" every now and then. Also Tailscale was mentioned...

Okay, How?

The repo has a REMOTE.md that provides a guide on remote access to the application. This works to expose the application over the LAN and host it on a Tailnet. However, there were a couple more steps to make this work in my Proxmox setup and have a proper subdomain rather than accessing the Tailscale IP or it's MagicDNS.

Creating a Home

Typically, I run most of my services as containerized applications in a Debian VM. Since T3Code will be running directly on the host and possibly be short-lived, a new LXC seemed to be the best way to go. I spun up a new Debian 13 LXC5 with 8GiB memory allocated, 10G of storage, 512MiB of swap, and a single CPU core. I definitely allocated more memory than necessary, so feel free to tune this down. From there, I needed Bun and Node to build the project. I chose to use fnm to manage the node installation on the LXC. Once Git was set up, it was time to move on.

A Couple Steps More

Clone it from GitHub. it's linked above. Make sure that the Codex CLI is also installed, linked above.

Running the Application

For this step and the next, the T3Code docs cover it well. The only thing I found necessary to add was VITE_WS_URL=wss://your.domain.com as an environment variable if using a reverse proxy. It can be useful to have a process manager like pm2 to run T3Code in the background like pm2 start "bun run --cwd apps/server start -- --host 0.0.0.0 --port 3773 --no-browser" --name t3code

Reverse Proxy and DNS

I have a good enough domain that I use for my internal services, and T3Code was to become an accessible subdomain in Caddy. It's pretty straight forward to do this:

t3code.your.domain {
        tls {
                dns cloudflare {$CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN}
        }
        reverse_proxy YOUR_T3_IP:PORT
}

Create a DNS rewrite in Adguard or any other preferred DNS server, and there we go!

Closing

Slight hiccups to getting this running in a non-traditional way, but smooth overall. I will say that so far it lives up to being a better alternative to the Codex desktop application. We'll see if my stance changes on GUIs in the next couple of weeks-months.

  1. Or chronically online ↩

  2. Both described by the creator and by the fact that multiple commits have been written since I started writing this ↩

  3. Not that I ever came close to the rate limits. Not much of an "agents" person ↩

  4. No shade at the concept of vibe-coding or the like, but it's not quite what I'm going for at the moment ↩

  5. For those unaware of creating one or don't have a template, there's always Proxmox Helper Scripts ↩