Gravitational Teleport

Project Links	Description
Teleport Website	The official website of the project
Documentation	Admin guide, user manual and more
Demo Video	3-minute video overview of the UI.
Teleconsole	The free service to "invite" SSH clients behind NAT, built on top of Teleport
Blog	Our blog where we publish Teleport news

Introduction

Gravitational Teleport is a modern SSH server for remotely accessing clusters of Linux servers via SSH or HTTPS. It is intended to be used instead of sshd. Teleport enables teams to easily adopt the best SSH practices like:

• No need to distribute keys: Teleport uses certificate-based access with automatic expiration time.
• Enforcement of 2nd factor authentication.
• Cluster introspection: every Teleport node becomes a part of a cluster and is visible on the Web UI.
• Record and replay SSH sessions for knowledge sharing and auditing purposes.
• Collaboratively troubleshoot issues through session sharing.
• Connect to clusters located behind firewalls without direct Internet access via SSH bastions.
• Ability to integrate SSH credentials with your organization identities via OpenID Connect or SAML with endpoints like Okta or Active Directory.
• Keep the full audit log of all SSH sessions within a cluster.

Teleport is built on top of the high-quality Golang SSH implementation and it is fully compatible with OpenSSH.

Installing and Running

Download the latest binary release, unpack the .tar.gz and run sudo make install. This will copy Teleport binaries into /usr/local/bin.

Then you can run Teleport as a single-node cluster:

$ sudo teleport start 

In production, Teleport must run as root. But to play, just do chown $USER /var/lib/teleport and run it under $USER, in this case you will not be able to login as someone else though.

Building Teleport

Teleport source code consists of the actual Teleport daemon binary written in Golang, and also it has a web UI (located in /web directory) written in Javascript. The WebUI is not changed often and we keep it checked into Git under /dist, so you only need to build Golang:

Make sure you have Golang v1.8.3 or newer, then run:

#
# getting & building:
#

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/gravitational
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/gravitational
$ git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport.git
$ cd teleport
$ make

#
# Create the default data directory before starting:
#

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/teleport
$ sudo chown $USER /var/lib/teleport

If the build was successful the binaries will be placed in $GOPATH/src/github.com/gravitational/teleport/build

By default the web UI is not build into the binary, to run self-build teleport you have to set the environment variable: DEBUG=1, in debug mode the web UI will be loaded from web/dist directory.

Then you can run Teleport as a single-node cluster in development mode:

$ DEBUG=1 build/teleport start -d

To build the binary with embedded web assets:

$ make release
$ build/teleport start -d

If you want to release your own Teleport version, edit this Makefile, update VERSION and SUFFIX constants, then run make setver to update version.go

If you want to cut another binary release tarball, run make release.

NOTE: The Go compiler is somewhat sensitive to amount of memory: you will need at least 1GB of virtual memory to compile Teleport. 512MB instance without swap will not work.

Rebuilding Web UI

If you want to make changes to the web UI, you have to re-build the content of /dist directory, see web/README.md for instructions on how to update the Web UI.

Why did We Build Teleport?

Mature tech companies with significant infrastructure footprints tend to implement most of these patterns internally. Teleport allows smaller companies without significant in-house SSH expertise to easily adopt them, as well. Teleport comes with an accessible Web UI and a very permissive Apache 2.0 license to facilitate adoption and use.

Being a complete standalone tool, Teleport can be used as a software library enabling trust management in complex multi-cluster, multi-region scenarios across many teams within multiple organizations.

More Information

• Quick Start Guide
• Teleport Architecture
• Admin Manual
• User Manual
• FAQ

Contributing

The best way to contribute is to create issues or pull requests right here on Github. You can also reach the Gravitational team through their website

Is Teleport Secure and Production Ready?

Teleport has completed several security audits from a nationally recognized technology security companies. Some of them have been made public. We are comfortable with the use of Teleport from a security perspective.

However, Teleport is still a relatively young product so you may experience usability issues. We are actively supporting Teleport and addressing any issues that are submitted to this repo. Ask questions, send pull requests, report issues and don't be shy! :)

The latest stable Teleport build can be found in Releases

Known Issues

• Teleport does not officially support IPv6 yet.

Who Built Teleport?

Teleport was created by Gravitational Inc. We have built Teleport by borrowing from our previous experiences at Rackspace. It has been extracted from Telekube, our Kubernetes distribution optimized for deploying and remotely controlling complex applications into multiple environments at the same time:

• Multiple cloud regions
• Colocation
• Private enterprise clouds located behind firewalls