Introduction to Teleport

Teleport is an identity-aware, multi-protocol access proxy. Teleport understands the SSH, HTTPS, RDP, Kubernetes API, MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL wire protocols, plus many others.

With Teleport you can:

• Replace a mix of vaults, passwords, API keys and tokens with short-lived SSH and X.509 certs.
• Have a single access point and Single-Sign-On provider for all of your infrastructure, including SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, desktops, web applications, and more.
• Write policies with Terraform or Kubernetes resources for all clouds, environments and protocols and manage them with GitOps.
• Record SSH and kubectl exec sessions, DB queries, Windows desktop sessions, web sessions and API requests.
• Use mutual TLS tunnels to protect your infrastructure endpoints.

Try out Teleport

If you are curious to see how Teleport works, you can get started by spinning up a demo cluster on a Linux server. After seeing how your demo Teleport cluster lets you securely access a server and play back your SSH sessions, you can configure RBAC, add resources, and protect your home lab with Teleport.

You can also get started right away with a production-ready Teleport cluster. Sign up for a free trial of Teleport Team.

Once you are ready to learn more about Teleport, read our Core Concepts guide, which introduces the components of a Teleport cluster. You can refer to this glossary as you continue through the documentation.

Choose an edition

After trying out Teleport, you are ready to deploy a cluster to your infrastructure. Teleport has four editions:

• Teleport Team
• Teleport Enterprise Cloud
• Teleport Enterprise
• Teleport Community Edition

You can compare these in our Choose an Edition section.

Deploy a cluster

Once you know which edition you would like to deploy, read our Deploy a Cluster documentation for how to launch a fully fledged Teleport cluster in production. (If you are using Teleport Enterprise Cloud, you can skip this step.) This section shows you the best practices to follow for a high-availability Teleport cluster, and how to deploy Teleport on your cloud provider of choice.

Manage access

Now that you have a running Teleport cluster, set up role-based access controls to enable secure access to your infrastructure. You can define roles with granular permissions and use Teleport's integrations with Single Sign-On providers to automatically map these roles to users. You can also set up Access Requests to enable just-in-time access to your infrastructure. Read Manage Access to get started.

Manage your cluster

With your Teleport cluster configured, you can now begin Day Two operations such as upgrades, adding agents to the cluster, and integrating Teleport with third-party tools. Read Manage your Cluster for more information.

Add your infrastructure

Teleport is protocol aware and provides functionality that is unique to each protocol it supports. To enable access to a protocol, deploy the appropriate Teleport service and configure it to communicate with resources in your infrastructure.

Read about how to enable access to:

• Servers, including OpenSSH servers that do not have Teleport installed
• Kubernetes clusters
• Databases
• Applications
• Remote desktops

You can also set up Machine ID to enable service accounts to access resources in your infrastructure with short-lived credentials.

Extend Teleport for your organization

Teleport is highly customizable, exposing much of its functionality via a gRPC API. For example, you can build API clients to register infrastructure automatically or manage Access Requests using your organization's unique workflows. Read how to build applications that interact with Teleport's API in our API guides.

Learn more about Teleport

Get more information about Teleport by reading our library of architecture, reference, and developer guides. See the Upcoming Releases section for a glimpse of features we will release in the next Teleport version. Consult our Reference guides for comprehensive lists of configuration options, CLI flags, and more. For detailed explanations of how Teleport works, see the Architecture section.

Finally, if you're interested in adding to Teleport's documentation, view our contribution guide.