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gravitational logoteleport

The easiest, and most secure way to access and protect all of your infrastructure.

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Quick Overview

Teleport is an open-source, identity-aware access proxy for SSH, Kubernetes, web applications, and databases. It provides secure access to infrastructure across multi-cloud environments, replacing traditional VPNs and SSH key management. Teleport enables teams to implement security best practices like Zero Trust and BeyondCorp models.

Pros

  • Unified access for multiple protocols (SSH, Kubernetes, databases, web apps)
  • Strong security features including certificate-based authentication and audit logging
  • Seamless integration with existing infrastructure and identity providers
  • Easy to scale and manage across multi-cloud environments

Cons

  • Steeper learning curve compared to traditional SSH/VPN solutions
  • Requires changes to existing workflows and infrastructure setup
  • May be overkill for small teams or simple environments
  • Some advanced features are only available in the enterprise edition

Getting Started

To get started with Teleport, follow these steps:

  1. Install Teleport:
curl -O https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-v9.0.0-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-v9.0.0-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
cd teleport
sudo ./install
  1. Generate a minimal configuration file:
sudo teleport configure --acme --acme-email=your-email@example.com > teleport.yaml
  1. Start the Teleport service:
sudo teleport start --config teleport.yaml
  1. Create a user and generate credentials:
sudo tctl users add myuser --roles=editor,access
  1. Connect to Teleport using tsh:
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=myuser

For more detailed instructions and advanced configurations, refer to the official Teleport documentation.

Competitor Comparisons

hashicorp logo

boundary

3,844

Boundary enables identity-based access management for dynamic infrastructure.

Pros of Boundary

  • More flexible identity-based access control with fine-grained permissions
  • Better integration with HashiCorp ecosystem (Vault, Terraform, etc.)
  • Simpler setup and configuration for small to medium-sized deployments

Cons of Boundary

  • Less mature and feature-rich compared to Teleport
  • Limited support for advanced authentication methods (e.g., hardware tokens)
  • Smaller community and ecosystem of third-party integrations

Code Comparison

Teleport configuration example:

teleport:
  nodename: example-node
  data_dir: /var/lib/teleport
  auth_token: secret-token
  auth_servers:
    - 10.1.0.5:3025

Boundary configuration example:

controller {
  name = "example-controller"
  database {
    url = "postgresql://boundary:boundary@localhost/boundary"
  }
  public_cluster_addr = "boundary.example.com"
}

Both projects aim to provide secure access to infrastructure, but they differ in their approach and feature sets. Teleport offers a more comprehensive solution with advanced features and broader protocol support, while Boundary focuses on simplicity and tight integration with the HashiCorp ecosystem. The choice between them depends on specific use cases and existing infrastructure.

pritunl logo

pritunl

4,404

Enterprise VPN server

Pros of Pritunl

  • Simpler setup and configuration process
  • More lightweight and resource-efficient
  • Better suited for small to medium-sized organizations

Cons of Pritunl

  • Limited advanced features compared to Teleport
  • Less comprehensive audit logging and compliance capabilities
  • Fewer integrations with third-party tools and services

Code Comparison

Pritunl (Python):

def start_server(server, delay=0):
    from pritunl import utils
    from pritunl import logger

    if delay:
        logger.info('Delaying server start', 'server',
            server_id=server.id,
            delay=delay,
        )
        time.sleep(delay)

Teleport (Go):

func (s *Server) Start() error {
    s.Lock()
    defer s.Unlock()

    if s.started {
        return trace.AlreadyExists("server is already started")
    }
    s.started = true
    return nil
}

Both projects use different programming languages, with Pritunl primarily using Python and Teleport using Go. Pritunl's code snippet shows a server start function with a delay option, while Teleport's code demonstrates a more straightforward server start method with error handling. Teleport's implementation appears more robust and thread-safe due to its use of locks and error checking.

apache logo

guacamole-server

3,052

Mirror of Apache Guacamole Server

Pros of Guacamole Server

  • Provides a clientless remote desktop gateway, accessible through a web browser
  • Supports multiple protocols (RDP, VNC, SSH) in a single solution
  • Highly extensible with a plugin architecture for adding new protocols

Cons of Guacamole Server

  • Requires more setup and configuration compared to Teleport
  • Less focus on security auditing and compliance features
  • Limited built-in support for modern authentication methods (e.g., SSO, MFA)

Code Comparison

Teleport (Go):

func (s *Server) Start() error {
    s.Lock()
    defer s.Unlock()
    if s.started {
        return trace.AlreadyExists("server is already started")
    }
    s.started = true
    return nil
}

Guacamole Server (C):

int guac_client_start(guac_client* client) {
    if (client->state != GUAC_CLIENT_WAITING)
        return 1;
    client->state = GUAC_CLIENT_RUNNING;
    return 0;
}

Both examples show server/client start functions, but Teleport uses Go with more robust error handling and locking, while Guacamole Server uses C with simpler state management.

cloudflare logo

cloudflared

9,063

Cloudflare Tunnel client (formerly Argo Tunnel)

Pros of cloudflared

  • Simpler setup and configuration for basic use cases
  • Tighter integration with Cloudflare's ecosystem and services
  • Lightweight and focused on tunneling functionality

Cons of cloudflared

  • Limited access control and authentication features compared to Teleport
  • Less comprehensive auditing and logging capabilities
  • Narrower scope of supported protocols and services

Code Comparison

Teleport configuration example:

teleport:
  nodename: example-node
  data_dir: /var/lib/teleport
  auth_token: secret-token
  auth_servers:
    - auth.example.com:3025

cloudflared configuration example:

tunnel: example-tunnel
credentials-file: /path/to/credentials.json
ingress:
  - hostname: example.com
    service: http://localhost:8000
  - service: http_status:404

Both projects aim to provide secure access to resources, but Teleport offers a more comprehensive suite of features for access management, auditing, and multi-protocol support. cloudflared, on the other hand, focuses on providing simple and efficient tunneling capabilities, particularly within the Cloudflare ecosystem.

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README

Teleport provides connectivity, authentication, access controls and audit for infrastructure.

Here is why you might use Teleport:

  • Set up SSO for all of your cloud infrastructure [1].
  • Protect access to cloud and on-prem services using mTLS endpoints and short-lived certificates.
  • Establish tunnels to access services behind NATs and firewalls.
  • Provide an audit log with session recording and replay for various protocols.
  • Unify Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and enforce the principle of least privilege with access requests.

[1] The open source version supports only GitHub SSO.

Teleport works with SSH, Kubernetes, databases, RDP, and web services.


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Installing and Running
  3. Docker
  4. Building Teleport
  5. Why Did We Build Teleport?
  6. More Information
  7. Support and Contributing
  8. Is Teleport Secure and Production Ready?
  9. Who Built Teleport?
  10. License

Introduction

Teleport includes an identity-aware access proxy, a CA that issues short-lived certificates, a unified access control system and a tunneling system to access resources behind the firewall.

We have implemented Teleport as a single Go binary that integrates with multiple protocols and cloud services:

You can set up Teleport as a Linux daemon or a Kubernetes deployment.

Teleport focuses on best practices for infrastructure security:

  • No need to manage shared secrets such as SSH keys or Kubernetes tokens: it uses certificate-based auth with certificate expiration for all protocols.
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA) for everything.
  • Collaboratively troubleshoot issues through session sharing.
  • Single sign-on (SSO) for everything via GitHub Auth, OpenID Connect, or SAML with endpoints like Okta or Active Directory.
  • Infrastructure introspection: Use Teleport via the CLI or Web UI to view the status of every SSH node, database instance, Kubernetes cluster, or internal web app.

Teleport uses Go crypto. It is fully compatible with OpenSSH, sshd servers, and ssh clients, Kubernetes clusters and more.

Project LinksDescription
Teleport WebsiteThe official website of the project.
DocumentationAdmin guide, user manual and more.
BlogOur blog where we publish Teleport news.
ForumAsk us a setup question, post your tutorial, feedback, or idea on our forum.
SlackNeed help with your setup? Ping us in our Slack channel.
Cloud-hostedWe offer Enterprise with a Cloud-hosted option. For teams that require easy and secure access to their computing environments.

Installing and Running

To set up a single-instance Teleport cluster, follow our getting started guide. You can then register your servers, Kubernetes clusters, and other infrastructure with your Teleport cluster.

You can also get started with Teleport Enterprise Cloud, a managed Teleport deployment that makes it easier to enable secure access to your infrastructure.

Sign up for a free trial of Teleport Enterprise Cloud.

Follow our guide to registering your first server with Teleport Enterprise Cloud.

Docker

Deploy Teleport

If you wish to deploy Teleport inside a Docker container see the installation guide.

For Local Testing and Development

To run a full test suite locally, see the test dependencies list

Building Teleport

The teleport repository contains the Teleport daemon binary (written in Go) and a web UI written in Javascript (a git submodule located in the webassets/ directory).

If your intention is to build and deploy for use in a production infrastructure a released tag should be used. The default branch, master, is the current development branch for an upcoming major version. Get the latest release tags listed at https://goteleport.com/download/ and then use that tag in the git clone. For example git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport.git -b v16.0.0 gets release v16.0.0.

Dockerized Build

It is often easiest to build with Docker, which ensures that all required tooling is available for the build. To execute a dockerized build, ensure that docker is installed and running, and execute:

make -C build.assets build-binaries

Local Build

Dependencies

Ensure you have installed correct versions of necessary dependencies:

  • Go version from go.mod
  • If you wish to build the Rust-powered features like Desktop Access, see the Rust and Cargo versions in build.assets/Makefile (search for RUST_VERSION)
  • For tsh version > 10.x with FIDO2 support, you will need libfido2 and pkg-config installed locally
  • To build the web UI:
    • pnpm. If you have Node.js installed, run corepack enable pnpm to make pnpm available.
    • If you prefer not to install/use pnpm, but have docker available, you can run make docker-ui instead.
    • The Rust and Cargo version in build.assets/Makefile (search for RUST_VERSION) are required.
    • The wasm-pack version in build.assets/Makefile (search for WASM_PACK_VERSION) is required.
    • binaryen (which contains wasm-opt) is required to be installed manually on linux aarch64 (64-bit ARM). You can check if it's already installed on your system by running which wasm-opt. If not you can install it like apt-get install binaryen (for Debian-based Linux). wasm-pack will install this automatically on other platforms.

For an example of Dev Environment setup on a Mac, see these instructions.

Perform a build

Important

  • The Go compiler is somewhat sensitive to the amount of memory: you will need at least 1GB of virtual memory to compile Teleport. A 512MB instance without swap will not work.
  • This will build the latest version of Teleport, regardless of whether it is stable. If you want to build the latest stable release, run git checkout and git submodule update --recursive to the corresponding tag (for example,
  • run git checkout v8.0.0) before performing a build.

Get the source

git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport.git
cd teleport

To perform a build

make full

To build tsh with Apple TouchID support enabled:

Important

tsh binaries with Touch ID support are only functional using binaries signed with Teleport's Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple. If you are a Teleport maintainer, ask the team for access.

make build/tsh TOUCHID=yes

tsh dynamically links against libfido2 by default, to support development environments, as long as the library itself can be found:

$ brew install libfido2 pkg-config  # Replace with your package manager of choice

$ make build/tsh
> libfido2 found, setting FIDO2=dynamic
> (...)

Release binaries are linked statically against libfido2. You may switch the linking mode using the FIDO2 variable:

make build/tsh FIDO2=dynamic # dynamic linking
make build/tsh FIDO2=static  # static linking, for an easy setup use `make enter`
                             # or `build.assets/macos/build-fido2-macos.sh`.
make build/tsh FIDO2=off     # doesn't link libfido2 in any way

Build output and run locally

If the build succeeds, the installer will place the binaries in the build directory.

Before starting, create default data directories:

sudo mkdir -p -m0700 /var/lib/teleport
sudo chown $USER /var/lib/teleport

Running Teleport in a hot reload mode

To speed up your development process, you can run Teleport using CompileDaemon. This will build and run the Teleport binary, and then rebuild and restart it whenever any Go source files change.

  1. Install CompileDaemon:

    go install github.com/githubnemo/CompileDaemon@latest

    Note that we use go install instead of the suggested go get, because we don't want CompileDaemon to become a dependency of the project.

  2. Build and run the Teleport binary:

    make teleport-hot-reload

    By default, this runs a teleport start command. If you want to customize the command, for example by providing a custom config file location, you can use the TELEPORT_ARGS parameter:

    make teleport-hot-reload TELEPORT_ARGS='start --config=/path/to/config.yaml'

Note that you still need to run make grpc if you modify any Protocol Buffers files to regenerate the generated Go sources; regenerating these sources should in turn cause the CompileDaemon to rebuild and restart Teleport.

Web UI

The Teleport Web UI resides in the web directory.

Rebuilding Web UI for development

To rebuild the Teleport UI package, run the following command:

make docker-ui

Then you can replace Teleport Web UI files with the files from the newly-generated /dist folder.

To enable speedy iterations on the Web UI, you can run a local web-dev server.

You can also tell Teleport to load the Web UI assets from the source directory. To enable this behavior, set the environment variable DEBUG=1 and rebuild with the default target:

# Run Teleport as a single-node cluster in development mode:
DEBUG=1 ./build/teleport start -d

Keep the server running in this mode, and make your UI changes in /dist directory. For instructions about how to update the Web UI, read the web README.

Managing dependencies

All dependencies are managed using Go modules. Here are the instructions for some common tasks:

Add a new dependency

Latest version:

go get github.com/new/dependency

and update the source to use this dependency.

To get a specific version, use go get github.com/new/dependency@version instead.

Set dependency to a specific version

go get github.com/new/dependency@version

Update dependency to the latest version

go get -u github.com/new/dependency

Update all dependencies

go get -u all

Debugging dependencies

Why is a specific package imported?

go mod why $pkgname

Why is a specific module imported?

go mod why -m $modname

Why is a specific version of a module imported?

go mod graph | grep $modname

Devbox Build (experimental)

Note: Devbox support is still experimental. It's very possible things may not work as intended.

Teleport can be built using devbox. To use devbox, follow the instructions to install devbox here and then run:

devbox shell

This will install Teleport's various build dependencies and drop you into a shell with these dependencies. From here, you can build Teleport normally.

flake.nix

A nix flake is located in build.assets/flake that allows for installation of Teleport's less common build tooling. If this flake is updated, run:

devbox install

in order to make sure the changes in the flake are reflected in the local devbox shell.

Why did We Build Teleport?

The Teleport creators used to work together at Rackspace. We noticed that most cloud computing users struggle with setting up and configuring infrastructure security because popular tools, while flexible, are complex to understand and expensive to maintain. Additionally, most organizations use multiple infrastructure form factors such as several cloud providers, multiple cloud accounts, servers in colocation, and even smart devices. Some of those devices run on untrusted networks, behind third-party firewalls. This only magnifies complexity and increases operational overhead.

We had a choice, either start a security consulting business or build a solution that's dead-easy to use and understand. A real-time representation of all of your servers in the same room as you, as if they were magically teleported. Thus, Teleport was born!

More Information

Support and Contributing

We offer a few different options for support. First of all, we try to provide clear and comprehensive documentation. The docs are also in GitHub, so feel free to create a PR or file an issue if you have ideas for improvements. If you still have questions after reviewing our docs, you can also:

  • Join Teleport Discussions to ask questions. Our engineers are available there to help you.
  • If you want to contribute to Teleport or file a bug report/issue, you can create an issue here in GitHub.
  • If you are interested in Teleport Enterprise or more responsive support during a POC, we can also create a dedicated Slack channel for you during your POC. You can reach out to us through our website to arrange for a POC.

Is Teleport Secure and Production-Ready?

Yes -- Teleport is production-ready and designed to protect and facilitate access to the most precious and mission-critical applications.

Teleport has completed several security audits from nationally and internationally recognized technology security companies.

We publicize some of our audit results, security philosophy and related information on our trust page.

You can see the list of companies that use Teleport in production on the Teleport product page.

Who Built Teleport?

Teleport was created by Gravitational, Inc.. We have built Teleport by borrowing from our previous experiences at Rackspace. Learn more about Teleport and our history.

License

Teleport is distributed in multiple forms with different licensing implications.

The Teleport API module (all code in this repository under /api) is available under the Apache 2.0 license.

The remainder of the source code in this repository is available under the GNU Affero General Public License. Users compiling Teleport from source must comply with the terms of this license.

Teleport Community Edition builds distributed on http://goteleport.com/download are available under a modified Apache 2.0 license.