Teleport
Documentation Overview
Version preview- Older Versions
This page provides a tour of the major sections of the Teleport documentation.
We maintain a separate version of the Teleport documentation for each major version of Teleport that we support. If you are running a version earlier than v17, or want a preview of the next version's documentation, adjust the dropdown menu at the top of the page.
Get started
If you are curious to see how Teleport works, you can get started by spinning up a demo cluster on a Linux server. After seeing how your demo Teleport cluster lets you securely access a server and play back your SSH sessions, you can configure RBAC, add resources, and protect your infrastructure with Teleport.
Once you are ready to learn more about Teleport, read our Core Concepts guide, which introduces the components of a Teleport cluster. You can refer to this glossary as you continue through the documentation.
Critical guides
Guides in the "Home" section include information that all Teleport users will probably need to consult at some point:
- Installation: How to install Teleport binaries on your environment. If you are just getting started with Teleport, we recommend spinning up a demo cluster or signing up for a Teleport Enterprise Cloud trial.
- Frequently Asked Questions: If this page does not answer your question, try our AI-assisted search box on the left sidebar.
- Usage Reporting and Billing: How Teleport calculates usage metrics to determine customer billing.
- Upcoming Releases: Features to be introduced in future versions of Teleport.
- Changelog: A comprehensive collection of release notes.
- Teleport Assist: How to use the AI-guided Teleport client.
Choose an edition
After trying out Teleport, you are ready to deploy a cluster to your infrastructure. Teleport has three editions:
- Teleport Enterprise Cloud
- Teleport Enterprise
- Teleport Community Edition
You can compare these in our Choose an Edition section.
Deploy a cluster
Once you know which edition you would like to deploy, read our Deploy a Cluster documentation for how to launch a fully fledged Teleport cluster in production. (If you are using Teleport Enterprise Cloud, you can skip this step.) This section shows you the best practices to follow for a high-availability Teleport cluster, and how to deploy Teleport on your cloud provider of choice.
Manage access
Now that you have a running Teleport cluster, set up role-based access controls to enable secure access to your infrastructure. You can define roles with granular permissions and use Teleport's integrations with Single Sign-On providers to automatically map these roles to users. You can also set up Access Requests to enable just-in-time access to your infrastructure. Read Manage Access to get started.
Manage your cluster
With your Teleport cluster configured, you can now begin Day Two operations such as upgrades, adding agents to the cluster, and integrating Teleport with third-party tools. Read Manage your Cluster for more information.
Add your infrastructure
Teleport is protocol aware and provides functionality that is unique to each protocol it supports. To enable access to a protocol, deploy the appropriate Teleport service and configure it to communicate with resources in your infrastructure.
Set up the Teleport Discovery Service to automatically enroll infrastructure resources in your Teleport cluster.
Read about how to enable access to:
- Servers, including OpenSSH servers that do not have Teleport installed
- Kubernetes clusters
- Databases
- Applications
- Remote desktops
You can also set up Machine ID to enable service accounts to access resources in your infrastructure with short-lived credentials.
Extend Teleport for your organization
Teleport is highly customizable, exposing much of its functionality via a gRPC API. For example, you can build API clients to register infrastructure automatically or manage Access Requests using your organization's unique workflows. Read how to build applications that interact with Teleport's API in our API guides.
Learn more about Teleport
Get more information about Teleport by reading our library of architecture, reference, and developer guides. See the Upcoming Releases section for a glimpse of features we will release in the next Teleport version. Consult our Reference guides for comprehensive lists of configuration options, CLI flags, and more. For detailed explanations of how Teleport works, see the Architecture section.