Run Teleport as a Daemon

On Linux systems in non-containerized environments, we recommend running the teleport binary as a daemon using systemd. Using a daemon helps to ensure that the teleport process can remain running and available regardless of a controlling terminal session or parent process, and opens up additional configuration options that allow for better optimization, uptime, and availability.

This guide will outline best practices for installing, configuring, and starting teleport as a daemon on a Linux host using systemd.

Prerequisites

• A Linux host where you will install Teleport. The host must be configured to use systemd. To ensure that your host supports systemd, check whether /sbin/init is symbolically linked to /lib/systemd/systemd or similar:

$ readlink /sbin/init
/lib/systemd/systemd

danger

Teleport stores data in /var/lib/teleport. Make sure that regular/non-admin users do not have access to this folder on the Auth Service host.

Step 1/3. Install and configure Teleport

Select and complete the appropriate installation instructions for your environment.

Install Teleport on your Linux server:

1. Assign edition to one of the following, depending on your Teleport edition:

   Edition	Value
   Teleport Enterprise Cloud	cloud
   Teleport Enterprise (Self-Hosted)	enterprise
   Teleport Community Edition	oss

2. Get the version of Teleport to install. If you have automatic agent updates enabled in your cluster, query the latest Teleport version that is compatible with the updater:

   $ TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.com
   $ TELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/automaticupgrades/channel/default/version | sed 's/v//')"

   Otherwise, get the version of your Teleport cluster:

   $ TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.com
   $ TELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/ping | jq -r '.server_version')"

3. Install Teleport on your Linux server:

   $ curl https://cdn.teleport.dev/install-v16.4.7.sh | bash -s ${TELEPORT_VERSION} edition

   The installation script detects the package manager on your Linux server and uses it to install Teleport binaries. To customize your installation, learn about the Teleport package repositories in the installation guide.

Teleport requires a configuration YAML file to be created and configured in order to run. After initial installation, no configuration file exists until we create it. This guide will use a minimal Teleport configuration based on defaults, however in production environments we recommend reviewing configuration file options to better suit your needs.

To create the default Teleport configuration file, enter the following command:

$ sudo teleport configure -o file
Wrote config to file "/etc/teleport.yaml". Now you can start the server. Happy Teleporting!

Step 2/3. Create and configure a systemd service

Once you've installed the teleport binary and created a Teleport configuration file, let's create and configure the Teleport daemon.

Systemd is designed to use unit files, which are the files used to define and configure any service daemon on systemd, in this case the teleport service. The rest of this guide will focus on creating and configuring the teleport service daemon depending on your preferred installation method, either a package manager, or from source.

Package Manager Installation

We have included a default teleport daemon configuration for packages installed with DEM or RPM package managers. To check that this daemon was installed correctly, enter the following command:

$ sudo systemctl status teleport

You will see output similar to the following, including the file path (/lib/systemd/system/teleport.service) that contains the unit file for the systemd configuration being applied:

● teleport.service - Teleport Service
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/teleport.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)

Enter the following command to enable the systemd teleport daemon. Enabling the daemon using systemctl allows systemd to place the daemon in its dependency tree, ensuring that the Teleport service will be automatically restarted on any potential reboot:

$ sudo systemctl enable teleport

Next, enter the following command to start the teleport service daemon:

$ sudo systemctl start teleport

Confirm that the Teleport daemon was installed correctly by checking the service status. The following command will output a status of Active: active (running):

$ sudo systemctl status teleport | grep Active
Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-04-18 18:33:41 UTC; 41s ago

Source Installation

Enter the following teleport command to have Teleport output a systemd unit file to stdout to be reviewed and applied as needed:

$ teleport install systemd

If the output describes a good configuration for your environment, enter the command once again using the -o flag to write the output to a file within one of systemd's accepted unit file load paths. For most use cases, we recommend using the path /etc/systemd/system/teleport.service for your unit file:

$ sudo teleport install systemd -o /etc/systemd/system/teleport.service

Enable the teleport service daemon using systemctl so that systemd can place it in its dependency tree. This also ensures that the teleport service will be automatically restarted on any potential reboot:

$ sudo systemctl enable teleport

Start the teleport service daemon using systemctl:

$ sudo systemctl start teleport

Finally, confirm that the Teleport daemon has been installed correctly by checking the service daemon's status. The following command will output a status of Active: active (running) if the configuration has been applied correctly:

$ sudo systemctl status teleport | grep Active
Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-04-18 18:33:41 UTC; 41s ago

Step 3/3. Restart the Teleport daemon

Teleport supports graceful restarts, enabling you to easily change your Teleport configuration or upgrade your teleport binary without sacrificing availability.

Run the following command to gracefully restart the teleport daemon:

$ sudo systemctl reload teleport

This will perform a graceful restart, i.e. the Teleport daemon will fork a new process to handle new incoming requests, leaving the old daemon process running until existing clients disconnect (with a timeout of 30 hours).

Upgrading

To upgrade a host to a newer version of Teleport, you must:

• Replace the Teleport binaries, usually teleport and tctl.
• Execute systemctl reload teleport.

Understanding Teleport daemon command line options for unit file configuration

The teleport install systemd command includes a number of optional flags that you can use to strictly define parameters of the generated unit file and set where that output will be written. The following table includes all command line options available with the teleport install systemd command, a brief description of what they do, and their default settings:

Flag	Description	Default
--fd-limit	The maximum number of open file descriptors by the service, defined by LimitNOFILE in the unit file.	--fd-limit=8192
--env-file	The path to the EnvironmentFile defined by the system unit file, containing any potential variables to be used in the configuration.	--envfile=/etc/default/teleport
--pid-file	The path to the pid file containing the process identification number.	--pid-file=/run/teleport.pid
--teleport-path	The full path to the teleport binary.	--teleport-path=/usr/local/bin/teleport
-o, --output	The full unit file load path which will define where to create and store the system unit file itself. This flag is used to write the output to the designated file.	--output=/etc/systemd/system/teleport.service

While a default configuration can always be created using the sudo teleport install systemd -o /etc/systemd/system/teleport.servicecommand, the same configuration using command line options is demonstrated below:

$ sudo teleport install systemd \
--fd-limit=8192 \
--env-file=/etc/default/teleport \
--pid-file=/run/teleport.pid \
--teleport-path=/usr/local/bin/teleport \
--output=/etc/systemd/system/teleport.service

Next steps

In this guide, we showed you how to run teleport start as a systemd service. To see all commands that you can run via the teleport binary, see the Teleport CLI Reference.

While we used a minimal configuration in this guide, for a production Teleport cluster, you should consult our Configuration Reference.

For information on unit file configurations and unit file load paths, see systemd's documentation on systemd.unit configurations