Telepresence: Fast, Local Development for Kubernetes
Telepresence is a CNCF project that connects your workstation to a Kubernetes cluster. Code and debug a service locally — with your own IDE, debugger, and hot reload — while it receives real traffic from the cluster, without the container build/push/deploy cycle.
!Demo: connect, reach a cluster service, intercept it locally
Key Features
- Cluster access - Your workstation reaches cluster Services and Pods as
- Four attachment modes - Replace the remote container, intercept a
- Traffic filtering - Intercept only your own requests, selected by HTTP
- Sidecar or node-agent - The traffic-agent is either injected as a
- Remote environment, local process - Run with the remote container's
Getting Started
- Quick Start Guide - Get up and running in minutes
- Installation - Install the Telepresence client
- Documentation - Full documentation
How It Works
When Telepresence connects, it creates a virtual network interface on your workstation and routes cluster traffic through a traffic-manager deployed in the cluster. Attaching to a workload adds a traffic-agent — a sidecar or a node-agent — that hands the workload's traffic, environment, and volumes over to your machine. See the architecture overview for the full picture.
Community
- GitHub Discussions - Ask questions, share ideas, and help shape the roadmap
- CNCF Slack - Join #telepresence-oss
- Troubleshooting - Common issues and solutions
Sponsors
Telepresence is free and open source, and is kept that way by its sponsors. Sponsorship pays for fast issue responses, prompt security fixes, and new features. If your team relies on Telepresence, please consider sponsoring the project, or get in touch about a corporate sponsorship.
Thank you to our past sponsors:
Contributing
See AGENTS.md for build instructions, architecture overview, and development guidelines.
Code signing policy
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation. The Windows release binaries and installers are Authenticode-signed with it.
- Committers and reviewers: telepresence-maintainers (@thallgren, @bgruszka, @njayp, @breland-openai)
- Approvers: administrators (@khussey, @thallgren)
- Privacy policy: PRIVACY.md
License
Telepresence is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.