Teleport

Teleport is a unified access plane for infrastructure:

• Clusters of Linux servers via SSH or SSH-over-HTTPS in a browser
• Kubernetes clusters
• Web Applications
• Databases - (Postgres Preview)

It is intended to be used instead or together with sshd for organizations who need:

• SSH audit with session recording/replay.
• Kubernetes API Access with audit and kubectl exec recording/replay.
• Easily manage trust between teams, organizations and data centers.
• Application, SSH or Kubernetes access to behind-firewall clusters without any open ports.
• Role-based access control (RBAC) for SSH protocol.
• Unified RBAC for SSH and Kubernetes.

In addition to its hallmark features, Teleport is interesting for smaller teams because it facilitates easy adoption of the best infrastructure security practices like:

• No need to distribute keys: Teleport uses certificate-based access with automatic certificate expiration time.
• 2nd factor authentication (2FA) for Apps, SSH and Kubernetes.
• Collaboratively troubleshoot issues through session sharing.
• Single sign-on (SSO) for Applications, SSH/Kubernetes and your organization identities via Github Auth, OpenID Connect or SAML with endpoints like Okta or Active Directory.
• Cluster introspection: every SSH node and its status can be queried via CLI and Web UI.

Teleport is built on top of the high-quality Golang SSH implementation and it is fully compatible with OpenSSH and can be used with sshd servers and ssh clients.

Project Links	Description
Teleport Website	The official website of the project
Documentation	Admin guide, user manual and more
Demo Video	5-minute video overview of the UI.
Teleconsole	The free service to "invite" SSH clients behind NAT, built on top of Teleport
Blog	Our blog where we publish Teleport news
Community Forum	Teleport Community Forum

Installing and Running

Download the latest binary release, unpack the .tar.gz and run sudo ./install. This will copy Teleport binaries into /usr/local/bin.

Then you can run Teleport as a single-node cluster:

$ sudo teleport start

In a production environment Teleport must run as root. But to play, just do chown $USER /var/lib/teleport and run it under $USER, in this case you will not be able to login as someone else though.

Docker

Deploy Teleport

If you wish to deploy Teleport inside a Docker container:

# This command will pull the Teleport container image for version 5.0
# Replace 5.0 with the version you need:
$ docker pull quay.io/gravitational/teleport:5.0

View latest tags on Quay.io | gravitational/teleport

For Local Testing and Development

Follow instructions at docker/README

Building Teleport

Teleport source code consists of the actual Teleport daemon binary written in Golang, and also of a web UI (a git submodule located in /webassets directory) written in Javascript.

Make sure you have Golang v1.15 or newer, then run:

# get the source & build:
$ git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport.git
$ cd teleport
$ make full

# create the default data directory before starting:
$ sudo mkdir -p -m0700 /var/lib/teleport
$ sudo chown $USER /var/lib/teleport

If the build succeeds the binaries will be placed in $GOPATH/src/github.com/gravitational/teleport/build

NOTE: The Go compiler is somewhat sensitive to amount of memory: you will need at least 1GB of virtual memory to compile Teleport. 512MB instance without swap will not work.

NOTE: This will build the latest version of Teleport, regardless of whether it is stable. If you want to build the latest stable release, git checkout to that tag (e.g. git checkout v5.0.0) before running make full.

Rebuilding Web UI

Teleport Web UI is located in the Gravitational Webapps monorepo. You can clone that repository and rebuild teleport UI package with:

$ git clone [email protected]:gravitational/webapps.git
$ cd webapps
$ make build-teleport

Then you can replace Teleport web UI files with the one found in the generated /dist folder.

To enable speedy iterations on the Web UI, you can run a local web-dev server.

You can also tell teleport to load the web UI assets from the source directory. To enable this behavior, set the environment variable DEBUG=1 and rebuild with the default target:

# Run Teleport as a single-node cluster in development mode:
$ DEBUG=1 ./build/teleport start -d

Keep the server running in this mode, and make your UI changes in /dist directory. Refer to the webapps README for instructions on how to update the Web UI.

Updating Documentation

TL;DR version:

make docs
make run-docs

For more details, take a look at docs/README

Managing dependencies

Dependencies are managed using Go modules. Here are instructions for some common tasks:

Add a new dependency

Latest version:

go get github.com/new/dependency
# Update the source to actually use this dependency, then run:
make update-vendor

Specific version:

go get github.com/new/dependency@version
# Update the source to actually use this dependency, then run:
make update-vendor

Set dependency to a specific version

go get github.com/new/dependency@version
make update-vendor

Update dependency to the latest version

go get -u github.com/new/dependency
make update-vendor

Update all dependencies

go get -u all
make update-vendor

Debugging dependencies

Why is a specific package imported: go mod why $pkgname.

Why is a specific module imported: go mod why -m $modname.

Why is a specific version of a module imported: go mod graph | grep $modname.

Why did We Build Teleport?

The Teleport creators used to work together at Rackspace. We noticed that most cloud computing users struggle with setting up and configuring infrastructure security because popular tools, while flexible, are complex to understand and expensive to maintain. Additionally, most organizations use multiple infrastructure form factors such as several cloud providers, multiple cloud accounts, servers in colocation, and even smart devices. Some of those devices run on untrusted networks, behind third party firewalls. This only magnifies complexity and increases operational overhead.

We had a choice, either to start a security consulting business or build a solution that’s dead-easy to use and understand, something that creates an illusion of all of your servers being in the same room as you as if they were magically teleported. And Teleport was born!

More Information

• Quick Start Guide
• Teleport Architecture
• Admin Manual
• User Manual
• FAQ

Support and Contributing

We offer a few different options for support. First of all, we try to provide clear and comprehensive documentation. The docs are also in Github, so feel free to create a PR or file an issue if you think improvements can be made. If you still have questions after reviewing our docs, you can also:

• Join the Teleport Community to ask questions. Our engineers are available there to help you.
• If you want to contribute to Teleport or file a bug report/issue, you can do so by creating an issue here in Github.
• If you are interested in Teleport Enterprise or more responsive support during a POC, we can also create a dedicated Slack channel for you during your POC. You can reach out to us through our website to arrange for a POC.

Is Teleport Secure and Production Ready?

Teleport has completed several security audits from the nationally recognized technology security companies. Some of them have been made public. We are comfortable with the use of Teleport from a security perspective.

You can see the list of companies who use Teleport in production on the Teleport product page.

However, Teleport is still a relatively young product so you may experience usability issues. We are actively supporting Teleport and addressing any issues that are submitted to this repo. Ask questions, send pull requests, report issues and don't be shy! :)

The latest stable Teleport build can be found in Releases

Who Built Teleport?

Teleport was created by Gravitational Inc. We have built Teleport by borrowing from our previous experiences at Rackspace. It has been extracted from Gravity, our Kubernetes distribution optimized for deploying and remotely controlling complex applications into multiple environments at the same time:

• Multiple cloud regions
• Colocation
• Private enterprise clouds located behind firewalls