Well, all kinds of VPLS work over TE tunnels. Actually VPLS tunnels prefer LSP established with TE over LSP established with LDP.

Yes, you can establish VPLS tunnel without LDP if you have a working TE and yes, remote address should match for both VPLS and TE.

We have multiple te tunnels that have been working for years. I've tried a few times to add VPLS on those tunnels but never seems to work. I add the VPLS with the same remote address at both ends of the te tunnel and nothing. Any chance you could share a config?

Indeed you can have VPLS tunnel working over LSP established by TE. The thing is that for "simple" VPLS tunnel you need LDP (it works in "targeted" mode, no need to add interfaces) to establish VPLS itself. If you do BGP based VPLS you can work w/o LDP.

if you use LDP for VPLS signalling, LDP must be enabled only on endpoints not on all routers in path.

remote address of VPLS must match that of TE tunnel for VPLS to use this tunnel.

So TE endpoint address must be routed over TE tunnel itself.

Normally you will have routes to remote endpoint of TE tunnel along the path and the same routes will be used by targeted LDP for VPLS.

If the route to the TE endpoint is via the TE tunnel then surely the TE will would never be established as the route to the TE endpoint would be unreachable?

So assuming the core network consists of core routers with TE tunnels and an edge network of edge routers with VPLS tunnels are you saying the whole core network has to contain edge network routes?

If the route to the TE endpoint is via the TE tunnel then surely the TE will would never be established as the route to the TE endpoint would be unreachable?

Not necessarily - like I said, if you use at least partially specified path for TE tunnel, any router in path does not need to have route to other end - it just needs route to next hop in path. Consider network of 4 routers in row: R1-R2-R3-R4, where R1 and R4 are endpoints of TE tunnel. Normally, R1, R2 and R3 would need route to R4 to establish TE tunnel, but if on R1 you specify tunnel path as R2,R3, R1 only needs route to R2, R2 to R3 and R3 to R4. If you specify path partially as just R2, then R1 needs route to R2, but R2 and R3 need routes to R4.

Interesting. So in theory you could create a tunnel path on R1 with a loose hop address of the inbound connected interface of R2, R3 and R4 then static route to R4 loopback over the TE?

So assuming the core network consists of core routers with TE tunnels and an edge network of edge routers with VPLS tunnels are you saying the whole core network has to contain edge network routes?

My previous replies apply to the case when VPLS endpoint and TE endpoint is the same router. If both tunnels are not terminated on the same router, setup gets more complicated (unnecessarily perhaps). You will still need complete LSP from one endpoint of VPLS tunnel to another (from "edge" to "edge" - established by either TE or LDP), even if this LSP will traverse "core" TE tunnel, so you will have VPLS-over-TE-over-TE in your core network. If you have some specific setup in mind please describe it so we can discuss it in particular.