Introduction to Teleport Team

Teleport Team helps small organizations get started quickly enabling secure access to their infrastructure.

With Teleport Team, the Auth Service and Proxy Service are fully managed, giving you a scalable, fault tolerant certificate authority and reverse proxy that you can use to configure access from users across the globe to your infrastructure, including private networks.

After starting a free trial of Teleport Team, you can set up RBAC, enable single sign-on with GitHub or Teleport's own identity provider, and start protecting resources with Teleport.

Get started with Teleport Team

This guide walks you through the process of registering a local server with a Teleport Team account. You can then access the server through the browser and the terminal, and record your session so you can review it later.

Prerequisites

• A Teleport Team account. You can sign up for a free trial at the following page:

  https://goteleport.com/signup/

• Docker installed on your workstation. We will use a Docker container to register a server with Teleport via the Teleport SSH Service. You can find installation instructions on Docker's website.

  Docker is only required for the local demo environment we use in this guide. If you want to get started registering your servers in your infrastructure with Teleport, view our documentation on how to register servers and configure access to them.

• The tsh client tool. Visit our Installation Guide for instructions. If you want to get started quickly, you can skip this for now and access Teleport through your browser.

Step 1/4. Spin up your server

Start a Docker container on your workstation to register as a server in your Teleport Team tenant:

docker run -it ubuntu:22.10 /bin/bash

Your terminal will begin a shell session in the ubuntu:22.10 container. From there, make sure you have curl and telnet installed. When we run a script to install Teleport later in this guide, the script will require both of these tools:

apt update && apt install -y curl telnet

Keep this shell open in your terminal.

Step 2/4. Install the Teleport SSH Service

To install the Teleport SSH Service on your server, visit the Teleport Web UI at the address of your Teleport Team tenant, tenant-url.teleport.sh (e.g., mytenant.teleport.sh).

If this is your first time visiting the Web UI, you will see a prompt to add your first resource:

Clicking Add my first resource will take you to the Enroll New Resource view. Enter "server" in the search box as shown below:

Select "Ubuntu 14.04+" so you can register your Docker container.

After selecting an OS, you will see a script that you can copy from the Teleport Web UI:

The Teleport installation script uses sudo, which is not installed on your Docker container. Alias sudo in your container terminal to override this:

alias sudo=""

Copy the script and paste it into the shell you opened earlier on your Docker container.

Leave the script running in your shell. Teleport will run in the foreground. You will see a message in the Web UI that your new server connected successfully:

Click Next.

Confirm that you will authenticate as the root user and click Next:

From there, you can test the connection and access the server. Click Start Session to connect:

You should see a terminal prompt in a new browser window. Your Teleport Team account routes your SSH connection through the Teleport Proxy Service, which connects to your container via a reverse tunnel.

Reverse tunnels like this allow Teleport to manage access to resources like Kubernetes clusters and remote desktops, even if these resources are running on private networks.

Execute some commands in your terminal. When you have finished, run exit to end your session.

Return to your original browser window. In the Manage Access view, click Finish, then Browse existing resources to visit the main view of the Teleport Web UI.

Step 3/4. Play back your session

As Teleport Team proxies SSH connections to registered servers, it records the commands that users execute during their sessions so operators can play them back later to investigate issues.

In the Teleport Web UI, set the dropdown menu on the upper left of the screen to Management, then click Session Recordings. You will see your session from the previous step:

Click PLAY. You will see a full recording of your session.

Step 4/4. Access your server from the command line

Open a new terminal window and log in to your Teleport Team tenant via the command line, filling in the URL of your tenant and the name of your Teleport user:

tsh login --proxy=tenant-url.teleport.sh --user=username

List the servers your Teleport user can access. You should see the name of the container you just registered:

tsh ls
Node Name    Address    Labels
------------ ---------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
000000000000 ⟵ Tunnel   hostname=000000000000,teleport.internal/resource-id=000000000000

Access your server as the root user:

tsh ssh [email protected]node-name

Next steps

We have shown you how to use Teleport Team to quickly protect your infrastructure by registering a server with your Teleport Team cluster. From here, you can explore more of the documentation to see how to set up secure access for your infrastructure.

Register resources

Read about how you can register resources in your infrastructure, including:

• Additional SSH servers
• Cloud provider tools and internal web applications
• Databases
• Kubernetes clusters
• Service accounts
• Windows desktops

Connect to your infrastructure

Aside from tsh and the Web UI, you can also connect to Teleport with our desktop application, Teleport Connect.

Subscribe

After you finish your free trial, Teleport Team will charge based on usage. Check the pricing page for detailed billing information.