Get Started with Teleport

Teleport provides connectivity, authentication, access controls and audit for infrastructure.

It includes an identity-aware access proxy, a CA that issues short-lived certificates, a unified access control system and a tunneling system to access resources behind the firewall.

Teleport understands the SSH, HTTPS, RDP, Kubernetes API, MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL wire protocols, plus many others. It can integrate with Single Sign-On providers and enables you to apply access policies using infrastructure-as-code and GitOps tools.

See how Teleport works by completing the tutorial below. This shows you how to spin up a single-instance Teleport cluster on a Linux server using Teleport Community Edition. Once you deploy the cluster, you can configure RBAC, register resources, and protect your small-scale demo environments or home lab.

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

Set up a demo cluster

We will run the following Teleport services:

• Teleport Auth Service: The certificate authority for your cluster. It issues certificates and conducts authentication challenges. The Auth Service is typically inaccessible outside your private network.
• Teleport Proxy Service: The cluster frontend, which handles user requests, forwards user credentials to the Auth Service, and communicates with Teleport instances that enable access to specific resources in your infrastructure.
• Teleport SSH Service: An SSH server implementation that takes advantage of Teleport's short-lived certificates, sophisticated RBAC, session recording, and other features.

Prerequisites

You will need the following to deploy a demo Teleport cluster. If your environment doesn't meet the prerequisites above, you can get started with Teleport by signing up for a free trial of Teleport Team.

If you want to get a feel for Teleport commands and capabilities without setting up any infrastructure, take a look at the browser-based Teleport Labs.

• A Linux host with only port 443 open to ingress traffic. You must be able to install and run software on the host. Either configure access to the host via SSH for the initial setup (and open an SSH port in addition port 443) or enter the commands in this guide into an Amazon EC2 user data script, Google Compute Engine startup script, or similar.

  For a quick demo environment you can use to follow this guide, consider installing our DigitalOcean 1-Click droplet. View the installation page on DigitalOcean Marketplace. Once your droplet is ready, SSH into the droplet and follow the configuration wizard.

• A two-factor authenticator app such as Authy, Google Authenticator, or 1Password.

You must also have one of the following:

• A registered domain name.
• An authoritative DNS nameserver managed by your organization, plus an existing certificate authority. If using this approach, ensure that your browser is configured to use your organization's nameserver.

Step 1/4. Configure DNS

Teleport uses TLS to provide secure access to its Proxy Service and Auth Service, and this requires a domain name that clients can use to verify Teleport's certificate. Set up two DNS A records, each pointing to the IP address of your Linux host. Assuming teleport.example.com is your domain name, set up records for:

Step 2/4. Set up Teleport on your Linux host

Install Teleport

On your Linux host, run the following command to install the Teleport binary:

curl https://goteleport.com/static/install.sh | bash -s 14.0.1

Configure Teleport

Generate a configuration file for Teleport using the teleport configure command. This command requires information about a TLS certificate and private key.

If you are running Teleport on the internet, we recommend using Let's Encrypt to receive your key and certificate automatically. For private networks or custom deployments, use your own private key and certificate.

sudo teleport configure -o file \    --acme --acme-email=[email protected] \    --cluster-name=tele.example.com

sudo teleport configure -o file \    --cluster-name=tele.example.com \    --public-addr=tele.example.com:443 \    --cert-file=/var/lib/teleport/fullchain.pem \    --key-file=/var/lib/teleport/privkey.pem

Start Teleport

Configure your Teleport instance to start automatically when the host boots up by creating a systemd service for it. The instructions depend on how you installed your Teleport instance.

sudo systemctl enable teleport
sudo systemctl start teleport

sudo teleport install systemd -o /etc/systemd/system/teleport.service
sudo systemctl enable teleport
sudo systemctl start teleport

You can check the status of your Teleport instance with systemctl status teleport and view its logs with journalctl -fu teleport.

Access Teleport's Web UI via HTTPS at the domain you created earlier (e.g., https://teleport.example.com). You should see a welcome screen similar to the following:

Step 3/4. Create a Teleport user and set up two-factor authentication

In this step, we'll create a new Teleport user, teleport-admin, which is allowed to log into SSH hosts as any of the principals root, ubuntu, or ec2-user.

On your Linux host, run the following command:

tctl is an administrative tool that is used to configure Teleport's auth service.
sudo tctl users add teleport-admin --roles=editor,access --logins=root,ubuntu,ec2-user

The command prints a message similar to the following:

User "teleport-admin" has been created but requires a password. Share this URL with the user to complete user setup, link is valid for 1h:
https://teleport.example.com:443/web/invite/123abc456def789ghi123abc456def78

NOTE: Make sure teleport.example.com:443 points at a Teleport proxy which users can access.

Visit the provided URL in order to create your Teleport user.

Teleport enforces the use of two-factor authentication by default. It supports one-time passwords (OTP) and second-factor authenticators (WebAuthn). In this guide, you will need to enroll an OTP authenticator application using the QR code on the Teleport welcome screen.

curl -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/tsh-14.0.1.pkg

brew install teleport

curl.exe -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-v14.0.1-windows-amd64-bin.zip
Unzip the archive and move `tsh.exe` to your %PATH%

curl -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-v14.0.1-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-v14.0.1-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
cd teleport
sudo ./install
Teleport binaries have been copied to /usr/local/bin

Replace teleport.example.com with your Teleport cluster's public address as configured above.
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=teleport-admin
> Profile URL:        https://teleport.example.com:443  Logged in as:       teleport-admin  Cluster:            teleport.example.com  Roles:              access, editor  Logins:             root, ubuntu, ec2-user  Kubernetes:         enabled  Valid until:        2022-04-26 03:04:46 -0400 EDT [valid for 12h0m0s]  Extensions:         permit-agent-forwarding, permit-port-forwarding, permit-pty

Step 4/4. Enroll your infrastructure

With Teleport, you can protect all of the resources in your infrastructure behind a single identity-aware access proxy, including servers, databases, applications, Kubernetes clusters, Windows desktops, and cloud provider APIs.

To enroll a resource with Teleport, visit the Web UI and click the name of a resource on the sidebar, e.g., Servers, Applications, and Kubernetes. The Web UI will show you the steps you can take to enroll that resource.

In the Servers tab, you can see that you have already enrolled your Linux server.

Next step: deploy agents

Teleport agents proxy traffic to infrastructure resources like servers, databases, Kubernetes clusters, cloud provider APIs, and Windows desktops.

Step 4 showed you how to install agents manually, and you can also launch agents and enroll resources with them using infrastructure-as-code tools. For example, you can use Terraform to declare a pool of Teleport agents and configure them to proxy your infrastructure. Read Deploy Teleport Agents with Terraform to get started.