Gravitational Teleport

Gravitational Teleport is a modern security gateway for remotely accessing:

• Clusters of Linux servers via SSH or SSH-over-HTTPS in a browser.
• Kubernetes clusters.

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.
• Have 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 SSH and Kubernetes.
• Collaboratively troubleshoot issues through session sharing.
• Single sign-on (SSO) for 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.

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.

If you wish to deploy Teleport inside a Docker container:

# This command will pull the Teleport container image for version 4.0.4
# Replace 4.0.4 with the version you need:
$ docker pull quay.io/gravitational/teleport:4.0.4

View latest tags on Quay.io | gravitational/teleport

Building Teleport

Teleport source code consists of the actual Teleport daemon binary written in Golang, and also it has a web UI (located in /web directory) written in Javascript. The WebUI is not changed often and we keep it checked into Git under /dist, so you only need to build Golang:

Make sure you have Golang v1.12 or newer, then run:

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

# create the default data directory before starting:
$ sudo mkdir -p /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 v2.5.7) before running make full.

Rebuilding Web UI

To enable speedy iterations on the Web UI, teleport can 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:

$ make

# 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 web/README.md 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

Why did We Build Teleport?

Mature tech companies with significant infrastructure footprints tend to implement most of these patterns internally. Teleport allows smaller companies without significant in-house SSH expertise to easily adopt them, as well. Teleport comes with an accessible Web UI and a very permissive Apache 2.0 license to facilitate adoption and use.

Being a complete standalone tool, Teleport can be used as a software library enabling trust management in complex multi-cluster, multi-region scenarios across many teams within multiple organizations.

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