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Version: 19.x (unreleased)

Uninstall Teleport

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This guide explains how to uninstall Teleport completely including binaries, configurations and data.

How it works​

On a single host, a Teleport installation involves the following components, which you must remove in order to uninstall Teleport:

  • A daemon configuration to launch Teleport on system start
  • Teleport binaries
  • The Teleport data directory and configuration file

Uninstalling Teleport is a separate operation from tearing down a Teleport cluster, which depends on how you deployed the Teleport Auth Service, Proxy Service, and other Teleport cluster components.

Prerequisites​

  • A system with Teleport installed.
warning

These instructions only apply to non-containerized installations of Teleport.

If you are running Teleport in Kubernetes, you should uninstall the Helm chart release instead:

Example: uninstall the Helm release named 'teleport-kube-agent' in the 'teleport' namespace
helm uninstall --namespace teleport teleport-kube-agent

If you are running Teleport in Docker, you should stop the Teleport Docker container:

Example: Stop the Docker container named 'teleport'
docker stop teleport

Step 1/3. Stop any running Teleport processes​

Instruct systemd to stop the Teleport process, and disable it from automatically starting:

sudo systemctl stop teleport
sudo systemctl disable teleport

If these systemd commands do not work, you can "kill" all the running Teleport processes instead:

sudo killall teleport

Step 2/3. Remove Teleport binaries​

Follow the steps for your operating system to remove Teleport binaries.

Linux​

First, uninstall the Teleport automatic updater (teleport-update) and the Teleport versions it potentially installed:

teleport-update uninstall

Then, follow the instructions for your Linux distribution:

Uninstall the Teleport binary using APT:

sudo apt-get -y remove teleport-ent

For Teleport Community Edition, use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y remove teleport

Uninstall the Teleport APT repo:

sudo rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/teleport.list
Uninstall standalone DEB package

If the commands above do not work, you may have installed Teleport using a standalone DEB package. Remove it with:

Use "teleport" instead of "teleport-ent" for Teleport Community Edition
sudo dpkg -r teleport-ent

macOS​

note

These are the default paths to the Teleport binaries. If you have changed these from the defaults on your system, substitute those paths here. You can use dirname $(which teleport) to look this up automatically.

Remove the Teleport binaries and links to Teleport software from the machine:

sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tbot
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tctl
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/teleport
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tsh
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/fdpass-teleport
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/teleport-update
Uninstall macOS client tools

You may have Teleport software in the /Applications folder if you:

  • Installed from a macOS tarball for v17+ that includes tsh.app and tctl.app
  • Installed the macOS tsh client-only package for v16 or older versions.
  • Installed Teleport Connect for macOS

You can remove those with these commands:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/tsh.app
sudo rm -rf /Applications/tctl.app
sudo rm -rf /Applications/Teleport\ Connect.app

Windows​

Remove the tsh.exe, tctl.exe, and tbot.exe binaries from the machine:

del C:\Path\To\tsh.exe
del C:\Path\To\tctl.exe
del C:\Path\To\tbot.exe

You can uninstall Teleport Connect from the "Apps and Features" section of the Control Panel.

For reference, Teleport Connect binaries are installed to %PROGRAMFILES%\Teleport Connect.

If you are using Teleport's Windows auth package to provide passwordless logins for local users, you can remove it by running the setup program from an administrative command prompt:

> teleport-windows-auth-setup.exe uninstall

A reboot is necessary after the uninstall completes in order to fully remove the package.

Step 3/3. Remove Teleport data and configuration files​

note

These are the default paths to the Teleport config files and data directory. If you have changed these from the defaults on your system, substitute those paths here.

Remove the Teleport config file:

sudo rm -f /etc/teleport.yaml
Optional: Also remove the tbot config file, if you used it
$ sudo rm -f /etc/tbot.yaml

Remove the Teleport data directory:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/teleport

Optionally, also remove the global config file and local user data directory for tsh:

sudo rm -f /etc/tsh.yaml
rm -rf ~/.tsh

Teleport is now removed from your system.

Any Teleport services will stop appearing in your Teleport Web UI or the output of tsh ls once their last heartbeat has timed out. This usually occurs within 10-15 minutes of stopping the Teleport process.

Troubleshooting​

If you have manually installed Teleport binaries from a tarball into the /usr/local/bin directory on your system, you may see an error similar to the following when trying to install the teleport or teleport-ent RPM/DEB package:

Setting up teleport-ent (18.5.0) ...
Teleport system symlinks creation...
2025-12-12T16:34:56.715-04:00 INFO [UPDATER]   Validating binary name:fdpass-teleport agent/validate.go:68
2025-12-12T16:34:56.716-04:00 INFO [UPDATER]   Binary does not support version command name:fdpass-teleport agent/validate.go:79
2025-12-12T16:34:56.716-04:00 ERRO [UPDATER]   Command failed. error:[
ERROR REPORT:
Original Error: *errors.errorString file present
Stack Trace:
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent/installer.go:875 github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent.needsLink
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent/installer.go:835 github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent.(*LocalInstaller).tryLinks
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent/installer.go:483 github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent.(*LocalInstaller).TryLinkSystem
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent/updater.go:1401 github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/autoupdate/agent.(*Updater).LinkPackage
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/tool/teleport-update/main.go:443 main.cmdLinkPackage	github.com/gravitational/teleport/tool/teleport-update/main.go:251 main.Run
	github.com/gravitational/teleport/tool/teleport-update/main.go:73 main.main
	runtime/proc.go:283 runtime.main
	runtime/asm_amd64.s:1700 runtime.goexit
User Message: failed to link system package installation
	error evaluating link for fdpass-teleport
		refusing to replace file at /usr/local/bin/fdpass-teleport
			file present] teleport-update/main.go:271
dpkg: error processing package teleport-ent (--configure):
 installed teleport-ent package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 teleport-ent
needrestart is being skipped since dpkg has failed
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This error can be resolved by running the following commands to remove any previously-installed versions of the binaries, and then re-running the package installation using your original command.

sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tbot
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tctl
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/teleport
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tsh
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/fdpass-teleport
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/teleport-update