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.
Key Features
- Cluster access - Your workstation reaches cluster Services and Pods as if it were inside the cluster: cluster DNS, cluster IPs, no port-forwards.
- Four attachment modes - Replace the remote container, intercept a service port, wiretap a copy of the traffic, or ingest just the environment and volumes.
- Traffic filtering - Intercept only your own requests, selected by HTTP header or path, so a whole team can share one cluster without collisions.
- Sidecar or node-agent - The traffic-agent is either injected as a sidecar (the default), or runs as a node-hosted pod that attaches to workloads without modifying them: no injection, no pod restarts.
- Remote environment, local process - Run with the remote container's environment variables and volume mounts, so the code behaves like it does in the cluster.
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
Thank you to the sponsors who support the development of Telepresence:
You can support the project too, via GitHub Sponsors.
Contributing
See AGENTS.md for build instructions, architecture overview, and development guidelines.
License
Telepresence is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.