Teleport

Access Requests with Discord

Enterprise
Cloud

This guide will explain how to set up Discord to receive Access Request messages from Teleport. Teleport's Discord integration notifies individuals and channels of Access Requests. Users can then approve and deny Access Requests from within Discord, making it easier to implement security best practices without compromising productivity.

Prerequisites

A running Teleport Enterprise cluster, including the Auth Service and Proxy Service. For details on how to set this up, see our Enterprise Getting Started guide.
The Enterprise tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 13.0.3, which you can download by visiting your Teleport account.
```
tctl version
Teleport Enterprise v13.0.3 go1.20
tsh version
Teleport v13.0.3 go1.20
```

Cloud is not available for Teleport v.
Please use the latest version of Teleport Enterprise documentation.

Admin account on your Discord server. Installing a bot requires at least the "manager server" permission.
Either a Linux host or Kubernetes cluster where you will run the Discord plugin.
Make sure you can connect to Teleport. Log in to your cluster using tsh, then use tctl remotely:
```
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com [email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  13.0.3
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
```
You can run subsequent tctl commands in this guide on your local machine.
For full privileges, you can also run tctl commands on your Auth Service host.

Step 1/8. Define RBAC resources

Before you set up the Discord plugin, you will need to enable Role Access Requests in your Teleport cluster.

For the purpose of this guide, we will define an editor-requester role, which can request the built-in editor role, and an editor-reviewer role that can review requests for the editor role.

Create a file called editor-request-rbac.yaml with the following content:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-reviewer
spec:
  allow:
    review_requests:
      roles: ['editor']
---
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-requester
spec:
  allow:
    request:
      roles: ['editor']
      thresholds:
        - approve: 1
          deny: 1

Create the roles you defined:

tctl create -f editor-request-rbac.yaml
role 'editor-reviewer' has been created
role 'editor-requester' has been created

Allow yourself to review requests by users with the editor-requester role by assigning yourself the editor-reviewer role.

Assign the editor-reviewer role to your Teleport user by running the following commands, depending on whether you authenticate as a local Teleport user or via the github, saml, or oidc authentication connectors:

Retrieve your local user's configuration resource:

tctl get users/$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') > out.yaml

Edit out.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the list of existing roles:

  roles:
   - access
   - auditor
   - editor
+  - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f out.yaml

Retrieve your github configuration resource:

tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml

Edit github.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the teams_to_roles section. The team you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest team possible within your organization. This team must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f github.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to github.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:

tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml

Edit saml.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the attributes_to_roles section. The attribute you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f saml.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to saml.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:

tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml

Edit oidc.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the claims_to_roles section. The claim you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f oidc.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to oidc.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Log out of your Teleport cluster and log in again to assume the new role.

Create a user called myuser who has the editor-requester role. This user cannot edit your cluster configuration unless they request the editor role:

tctl users add myuser --roles=editor-requester

tctl will print an invitation URL to your terminal. Visit the URL and log in as myuser for the first time, registering credentials as configured for your Teleport cluster.

Later in this guide, you will have myuser request the editor role so you can review the request using the Teleport plugin.

Step 2/8. Install the Teleport Discord plugin

We currently only provide linux-amd64 binaries. You can also compile these plugins from source. You can run the plugin from a remote host or your local development machine.

We recommend installing Teleport plugins on the same host as the Teleport Proxy Service. This is an ideal location as plugins have a low memory footprint and will require access to both the public internet and the Teleport Auth Service.

curl -L -O https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-access-discord-v13.0.3-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-access-discord-v13.0.3-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
./teleport-access-discord/install

Make sure the binary is installed:

teleport-discord version
teleport-discord v13.0.3 git:teleport-discord-v13.0.3-fffffffff go1.20

To install from source you need git and go >= 1.20 installed.

Check out the teleport-plugins repository
git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport-plugins.git
cd teleport-plugins/access/discord
make

Place the teleport-discord binary into an appropriate location within the system's PATH, e.g., /usr/local/bin:

mv ./build/teleport-discord /usr/local/bin

Make sure the binary is installed:

teleport-discord version
teleport-discord v13.0.3 git:teleport-discord-v13.0.3-fffffffff go1.20

helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev/
helm repo update

Step 3/8. Create a user and role for the plugin

Teleport's Access Request plugins authenticate to your Teleport cluster as a user with permissions to list and read Access Requests. This way, plugins can retrieve Access Requests from the Teleport Auth Service and present them to reviewers.

Define a user and role called access-plugin by adding the following content to a file called access-plugin.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  allow:
    rules:
      - resources: ['access_request']
        verbs: ['list', 'read']
      - resources: ['access_plugin_data']
        verbs: ['update']
---
kind: user
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  roles: ['access-plugin']
version: v2

Create the user and role:

tctl create -f access-plugin.yaml

As with all Teleport users, the Teleport Auth Service authenticates the access-plugin user by issuing short-lived TLS credentials. In this case, we will need to request the credentials manually by impersonating the access-plugin role and user.

If you are using tctl from the Auth Service host, you will already have impersonation privileges.

To grant your user impersonation privileges for access-plugin, define a role called access-plugin-impersonator by pasting the following YAML document into a file called access-plugin-impersonator.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin-impersonator
spec:
  allow:
    impersonate:
      roles:
      - access-plugin
      users:
      - access-plugin

Create the access-plugin-impersonator role:

tctl create -f access-plugin-impersonator.yaml

Assign the access-plugin-impersonator role to your Teleport user by running the following commands, depending on whether you authenticate as a local Teleport user or via the github, saml, or oidc authentication connectors:

Retrieve your local user's configuration resource:

tctl get users/$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') > out.yaml

Edit out.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the list of existing roles:

  roles:
   - access
   - auditor
   - editor
+  - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f out.yaml

Retrieve your github configuration resource:

tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml

Edit github.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the teams_to_roles section. The team you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest team possible within your organization. This team must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f github.yaml

Warning

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:

tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml

Edit saml.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the attributes_to_roles section. The attribute you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f saml.yaml

Warning

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:

tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml

Edit oidc.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the claims_to_roles section. The claim you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f oidc.yaml

Warning

Log out of your Teleport cluster and log in again to assume the new role.

You will now be able to generate signed certificates for the access-plugin role and user.

Step 4/8. Export the access plugin identity

Like all Teleport users, access-plugin needs signed credentials in order to connect to your Teleport cluster. You will use the tctl auth sign command to request these credentials for your plugin.

The following tctl auth sign command impersonates the access-plugin user, generates signed credentials, and writes an identity file to the local directory:

tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=auth.pem

The plugin connects to the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC endpoint over TLS.

The identity file, auth.pem, includes both TLS and SSH credentials. The plugin uses the SSH credentials to connect to the Proxy Service, which establishes a reverse tunnel connection to the Auth Service. The plugin uses this reverse tunnel, along with your TLS credentials, to connect to the Auth Service's gRPC endpoint.

You will refer to this file later when configuring the plugin.

Certificate Lifetime

By default, tctl auth sign produces certificates with a relatively short lifetime. For production deployments, we suggest using Machine ID to programmatically issue and renew certificates for your plugin. See our Machine ID getting started guide to learn more.

The rest of this guide assumes that you have placed any files generated by this command into /var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord for later reference when configuring the plugin:

create a data directory to hold certificate files for the plugin.
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord
sudo mv auth.* /var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord

Step 5/8. Register a Discord app

The Access Request plugin for Discord receives Access Request events from the Teleport Auth Service, formats them into Discord messages, and sends them to the Discord API to post them in your guild (Discord server). For this to work, you must register a new app with the Discord API.

Create your application

Visit https://discord.com/developers/applications to create a new Discord application. Click "New Application" and name the application "Teleport".

Set the application icon (download application icon here).

Create the application bot

Go to the "Bot" tab and choose "Add Bot". Set the bot icon (download bot icon here). Un-check the "Public Bot" toggle as this bot should only be used within your Discord servers. Finally, press "Reset Token", copy and save the new token into a safe place. This token will be used by the Teleport plugin to authenticate against the Discord API.

Install and authorize the application in your Discord server

Go the the "OAuth2" tab, open the "URL Generator" and check the "bot" and "Send Messages" permissions.

Copy and access the generated URL. Choose to install the application into the desired Discord server. If the server is not available in the dropdown list, it means you don't have sufficient rights. Ask a server administrator to grant you a role with the "manage server" permission.

Note

The same application can be installed into multiple Discord servers. To do so, access the OAuth URL multiple times and choose different servers. You have to be admin on a Discord server to install the app into it.

Step 6/8. Configure the Teleport Discord plugin

At this point, the Teleport Discord plugin has the credentials it needs to communicate with your Teleport cluster and the Discord API. In this step, you will configure the Discord plugin to use these credentials. You will also configure the plugin to notify the right Discord channels when it receives an Access Request update.

Create a config file

The Teleport Discord plugin uses a config file in TOML format. Generate a boilerplate config by running the following command (the plugin will not run unless the config file is in /etc/teleport-discord.toml):

teleport-discord configure | sudo tee /etc/teleport-discord.toml > /dev/null

This should result in a config file like the one below:

# Example Discord plugin configuration TOML file

[teleport]
# Teleport Auth/Proxy Server address.
# addr = "example.com:3025"
#
# Should be port 3025 for Auth Server and 3080 or 443 for Proxy.
# For Teleport Cloud, should be in the form "your-account.teleport.sh:443".

# Credentials generated with `tctl auth sign`.
#
# When using --format=file:
# identity = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord/auth_id"    # Identity file
#
# When using --format=tls:
# client_key = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord/auth.key" # Teleport TLS secret key
# client_crt = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord/auth.crt" # Teleport TLS certificate
# root_cas = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/discord/auth.cas"   # Teleport CA certs

[discord]
# Discord Bot OAuth token
token = "XXXXXXXXX"

[role_to_recipients]
# Map roles to recipients.
#
# Provide Discord channel ID recipients for access requests for specific roles.
# "*" must be provided to match non-specified roles.
#
# "dev" = "1234567890"
# "*" = ["0987654321"]

[log]
output = "stderr" # Logger output. Could be "stdout", "stderr" or "/var/lib/teleport/discord.log"
severity = "INFO" # Logger severity. Could be "INFO", "ERROR", "DEBUG" or "WARN".

The Discord Helm Chart uses a YAML values file to configure the plugin. On your local workstation, create a file called teleport-discord-helm.yaml based on the following example:

teleport:
  # Teleport HTTPS Proxy web address, for Teleport Enterprise Cloud should be in the form "your-account.teleport.sh:443"
  address: "teleport.example.com:443"
  # Secret containing identity
  identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-discord-identity

discord:
  token: "XXXXXXXX"  # Discord Bot OAuth token

# Mapping from role to recipients
roleToRecipients: []
#  "*":
#    - "1234567890"  # security-team
#  "dev":
#    - "0987654321"  # dev-team-channel
#    - "1212121212"  # admin-team-channel

Edit the config file

Open the configuration file created for the Teleport Discord plugin and update the following fields:

[teleport]

The Discord plugin uses this section to connect to the Teleport Auth Service.

addr: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identity: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported earlier.

client_key, client_crt, root_cas: Comment these out, since we are not using them in this configuration.

address: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identitySecretName: Fill in the identitySecretName field with the name of the Kubernetes secret you created earlier.

[discord]

token: Paste the bot token saved previously in this field.

[role_to_recipients]

The role_to_recipients map configures the channels that the Discord plugin will notify when a user requests access to a specific role. When the Discord plugin receives an Access Request from the Auth Service, it will look up the role being requested and identify the Discord channels to notify.

Each channel is represented by a numeric ID. Channels can be public, private or direct messages between a user and the bot. To determine the numeric ID of a channel for the bot to notify, follow the instructions below:

Open Discord in a web browser and navigate to the desired channel.

The web browser URL should look like:

https://discord.com/channels/<guild ID>/<channel ID>

Copy the last part of the URL (everything after the last /), which is the channel ID.

Open Discord in a web browser and navigate to the desired channel.

In the channel list choose "Create invite", type "teleport" in the search field and invite your Discord Teleport bot. The bot should now appear in the channel member list.

The web browser URL should look like:

https://discord.com/channels/<guild ID>/<channel ID>

Copy the last part of the URL (everything after the last /), which is the channel ID.

To retrieve the channel ID of the private discussion between User A and the Teleport bot, have User A send a direct message to the Teleport bot. This will open a conversation between the user and the bot. Once the conversation is initiated, the user can open the discussion page.

The web browser URL should look like:

https://discord.com/channels/@me/<channel ID>

Copy the last part of the URL (everything after the last /), which is the channel ID.

In the role_to_recipients map, each key is the name of a Teleport role. Each value configures the Discord channel (or channels) to notify. The value can be a single string or an array of strings.

The role_to_recipients map must also include an entry for "*", which the plugin looks up if no other entry matches a given role name. In the example above, requests for roles aside from dev will notify the security-team channel.

Configure the Discord plugin to notify you when a user requests the editor role by adding the following to your role_to_recipients config (replace YOUR-CHANNEL-ID with a valid channel ID):

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = "YOUR-CHANNEL-ID"
"editor" = "YOUR-CHANNEL-ID"

roleToRecipients:
  "*": "YOUR-CHANNEL-ID"
  "editor": "YOUR-CHANNEL-ID"

Step 7/8. Test your Discord app

Once Teleport is running, you've created the Discord app, and the plugin is configured, you can now run the plugin and test the workflow.

Start the plugin:

teleport-discord start

If everything works fine, the log output should look like this:

teleport-discord start
INFO   Starting Teleport Access Discord Plugin 7.2.1: discord/app.go:80
INFO   Plugin is ready discord/app.go:101

Install the plugin:

helm upgrade --install teleport-plugin-discord teleport/teleport-plugin-discord --values teleport-discord-helm.yaml

To inspect the plugin's logs, use the following command:

kubectl logs deploy/teleport-plugin-discord

Debug logs can be enabled by setting log.severity to DEBUG in teleport-discord-helm.yaml and executing the helm upgrade ... command above again. Then you can restart the plugin with the following command:

kubectl rollout restart deployment teleport-plugin-discord

Create an Access Request and check if the plugin works as expected with the following steps.

Create an Access Request

A Teleport admin can create an Access Request for another user with tctl:

tctl request create myuser --roles=editor

Users can use tsh to create an Access Request and log in with approved roles:

tsh request create --roles=editor
Seeking request approval... (id: 8f77d2d1-2bbf-4031-a300-58926237a807)

Users can request access using the Web UI by visiting the "Access Requests" tab and clicking "New Request":

Creating an Access Request using the Web UI

The channel you configured earlier to review the request should receive a message from "Teleport" in Discord allowing them to visit a link in the Teleport Web UI and either approve or deny the request.

Resolve the request

Once you receive an Access Request message, click the link to visit Teleport and approve or deny the request:

You can also review an Access Request from the command line:

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tctl request approve REQUEST_ID
tctl request deny REQUEST_ID

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tsh request review --approve REQUEST_ID
tsh request review --deny REQUEST_ID

Once the request is resolved, the Discord bot will update the access request message with ✅ or ❌, depending on whether the request was approved or denied.

Auditing Access Requests

When the Discord plugin posts an Access Request notification to a channel, anyone with access to the channel can view the notification and follow the link. While users must be authorized via their Teleport roles to review Access Requests, you should still check the Teleport audit log to ensure that the right users are reviewing the right requests.

When auditing Access Request reviews, check for events with the type Access Request Reviewed in the Teleport Web UI and access_request.review if reviewing the audit log on the Auth Service host.

Step 8/8. Set up systemd

This section is only relevant if you are running the Teleport Discord plugin on a Linux host.

In production, we recommend starting the Teleport plugin daemon via an init system like systemd. Here's the recommended Teleport plugin service unit file for systemd:

[Unit]
Description=Teleport Discord Plugin
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/teleport-discord start --config=/etc/teleport-discord.toml
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
PIDFile=/run/teleport-discord.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save this as teleport-discord.service in either /usr/lib/systemd/system/ or another unit file load path supported by systemd.

Enable and start the plugin:

sudo systemctl enable teleport-discord
sudo systemctl start teleport-discord

Next steps

Read our guides to configuring Resource Access Requests and Role Access Requests so you can get the most out of your Access Request plugins.

Feedback

If you have any issues with this plugin, please create a GitHub issue in our gravitational/teleport-plugins repo.

Have a suggestion or can’t find something?

IMPROVE THE DOCS