Teleport
CLI References
- Edge version
- Version 17.x
- Version 16.x
- Version 15.x
- Older Versions
Teleport is made up of five CLI tools.
- teleport: Supports the Teleport Access Platform by starting and configuring various Teleport services.
- tsh: Allows end users to authenticate to Teleport and access resources in a cluster.
- tctl: Used to configure the Teleport Auth Service.
- tbot: Supports Machine ID, which provides short lived credentials to service accounts (e.g, a CI/CD server).
- fdpass-teleport: Supports integrating Machine ID with OpenSSH for higher performance SSH connections.
When running Teleport in production, you should adhere to the following best practices to avoid security incidents:
- 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. Don't give users
permissive roles when more a restrictive role will do.
For example, don't assign users the built-in
access,editor
roles, which give them permissions to access and edit all cluster resources. Instead, define roles with the minimum required permissions for each user and configure Access Requests to provide temporary elevated permissions. - When you enroll Teleport resources—for example, new databases or applications—you
should save the invitation token to a file.
If you enter the token directly on the command line, a malicious user could view
it by running the
history
command on a compromised system.
You should note that these practices aren't necessarily reflected in the examples used in documentation. Examples in the documentation are primarily intended for demonstration and for development environments.
Teleport's CLI tools can provide completion hints for bash and zsh.
For example, typing tsh
and pressing Tab
will show all available
subcommands, typing tsh --
and pressing Tab
will show all available flags.
To enable completion, add an additional statement to your shell configuration file.
Example (.bashrc
):
eval "$(tsh --completion-script-bash)"
Example (.zshrc
):
# enable completion feature
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit
eval "$(tsh --completion-script-zsh)"
Reload your shell to see the changes.
You can repeat the same process for tctl
, teleport
, and tbot
.
Backing up production instances, environments, and/or settings before making permanent modifications is encouraged as a best practice. Doing so allows you to roll back to an existing state if needed.
Resource filtering
Both tsh
and tctl
allow you to filter servers, applications, databases,
desktops, and Kubernetes clusters using the --search
and --query
flags.
The --search
flag performs a simple fuzzy search on resource fields. For example, --search=mac
searches for resources containing mac
.
The --query
flag allows you to perform more sophisticated searches using a predicate language.
In both cases, you can further refine the results by appending a list of comma-separated labels to the command. For example:
tsh ls --search=foo,bar labelKey1=labelValue1,labelKey2=labelValue2
Filter Examples
List all nodes
tsh lsList nodes using label argument
tsh ls env=staging,os=macList nodes using search keywords
tsh ls --search=staging,macList nodes using predicate language. This query searches for nodes with labels
with key `env` equal to `staging` and key `os` equal to `mac`.
tsh ls --query='labels["env"] == "staging" && equals(labels["os"], "mac")'