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Teleport

Local Users

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In Teleport, local users are users managed directly via Teleport, rather than a third-party identity provider.

Local user accounts can be used alongside external user accounts managed via GitHub.

This guide shows you how to:

Prerequisites

  • A running Teleport cluster. For details on how to set this up, see one of our Getting Started guides.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 13.0.3.

    tctl version

    Teleport v13.0.3 go1.20

    tsh version

    Teleport v13.0.3 go1.20

    See Installation for details.

  • A running Teleport Enterprise cluster. 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.
  • 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.

Adding local users

A user identity in Teleport exists in the scope of a cluster. A Teleport administrator creates Teleport user accounts and maps them to the roles they can use.

Let's look at this table:

Teleport UserAllowed OS LoginsDescription
joejoe, rootTeleport user joe can log in to member Nodes as user joe or root on the OS.
bobbobTeleport user bob can log in to member Nodes only as OS user bob.
kimIf no OS login is specified, it defaults to the same name as the Teleport user, kim.

Let's add a new user to Teleport using the tctl tool:

tctl users add joe --logins=joe,root --roles=access,editor

Teleport generates an auto-expiring token (with a TTL of one hour) and prints the token URL, which must be used before the TTL expires.

User "joe" has been created but requires a password. Share this URL with the user to complete user setup, link is valid for 1h:

https://<proxy_host>:443/web/invite/<token>

NOTE: Make sure <proxy_host>:443 points at a Teleport proxy which users can access.

The user completes registration by visiting this URL in their web browser, picking a password, and configuring second-factor authentication. If the credentials are correct, the Teleport Auth Server generates and signs a new certificate, and the client stores this key and will use it for subsequent logins.

The key will automatically expire after 12 hours by default, after which the user will need to log back in with their credentials. This TTL can be configured to a different value.

Once authenticated, the account will become visible via tctl:

tctl users ls

User Allowed Logins

---- --------------

admin admin,root

kim kim

joe joe,root

Editing users

Admins can edit user entries via tctl.

For example, to see the full list of user records, an administrator can execute:

tctl get users

To edit the user joe:

Dump the user definition into a file:

tctl get user/joe > joe.yaml

... edit the contents of joe.yaml

Update the user record:

tctl create -f joe.yaml

Deleting users

Admins can delete a local user via tctl:

tctl users rm joe

Next steps

In addition to users, you can use tctl to manage roles and other dynamic resources. See our Teleport Resources Reference.

For all available tctl commands and flags, see our CLI Reference.

You can also configure Teleport so that users can log in using an SSO provider. For more information, see:

In addition to users, you can use tctl to manage roles and other dynamic resources. See our Teleport Resources Reference.

For all available tctl commands and flags, see our CLI Reference.

You can also configure Teleport so that users can log in using GitHub. For more information, see GitHub SSO.