Teleport

API Getting Started Guide

Getting Started

In this getting started guide we will use the Teleport API Go client to connect to a Teleport Node configured as an Auth Server.

Here are the steps we'll walkthrough:

Create an API user using a simple role-based authentication method.
Generate credentials for that user.
Create and connect a Go client to interact with Teleport's API.

Prerequisites

Install Go 1.17+ and Go development environment.
Set up Teleport through one of our getting started guides. You can also begin a free trial of Teleport Cloud.

Step 1/3. Create a user

When running Teleport in production, we recommend that you follow the practices below to avoid security incidents. These practices may differ from the examples used in this guide, which are intended for demo environments:

Avoid using sudo in production environments unless it's necessary.
Create new, non-root, users and use test instances for experimenting with Teleport.
Run Teleport's services as a non-root user unless required. Only the SSH Service requires root access. Note that you will need root permissions (or the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability) to make Teleport listen on a port numbered < 1024 (e.g. 443).
Follow the "Principle of Least Privilege" (PoLP). Don't give users permissive roles when giving them more restrictive roles will do instead. For example, assign users the built-in access,editor roles.
When joining a Teleport agent to a cluster, save the invitation token to a file. Otherwise, the token will be visible when examining the teleport command that started the agent, e.g., via the history command on a compromised system.

Tip

Read API authorization to learn more about defining custom roles for your API client.

Create a user api-admin with the built-in role editor:

Run this directly on your Auth Server unless you are using Teleport Cloud
Add a user and login via the Proxy Service
sudo tctl users add api-admin --roles=editor

Step 2/3. Generate client credentials

generate tsh profile
tsh login --user=api-admin --proxy=tele.example.com

The Profile Credentials loader will automatically retrieve Credentials from the current profile in the next step.

Step 3/3. Create a Go project

Set up a new Go module and import the client package:

mkdir client-demo && cd client-demo
go mod init client-demo
go get github.com/gravitational/teleport/api/client

Create a file called main.go, modifying the Addrs strings as needed:

package main

import (
	"context"
	"log"

	"github.com/gravitational/teleport/api/client"
)

func main() {
	ctx := context.Background()

	clt, err := client.New(ctx, client.Config{
		Addrs: []string{
			// Teleport Cloud customers should use <tenantname>.teleport.sh
			"tele.example.com:443",
			"tele.example.com:3025",
			"tele.example.com:3024",
			"tele.example.com:3080",
 		},
		Credentials: []client.Credentials{
			client.LoadProfile("", ""),
		},
	})

	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("failed to create client: %v", err)
	}

	defer clt.Close()
	resp, err := clt.Ping(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("failed to ping server: %v", err)
	}

	log.Printf("Example success!")
	log.Printf("Example server response: %s", resp)
	log.Printf("Server version: %s", resp.ServerVersion)
}

Now you can run the program and connect the client to the Teleport Auth Server to fetch the server version.

go run main.go

Next steps

Learn about pkg.go.dev
Learn how to use the client
Learn how to work with credentials
Read about Teleport API architecture for an in-depth overview of the API and API clients.
Read API authorization to learn more about defining custom roles for your API client.
Review the client pkg.go reference documentation for more information about working with the Teleport API programmatically.
Familiarize yourself with the admin manual to make the best use of the API.

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