Enabling Plugins
Introduction
In this section, you’ll learn how to configure Kong plugins. One of the core principles of Kong is its extensibility through plugins. Plugins allow you to easily add new features to your API or make your API easier to manage.
In the steps below you will configure the basic-auth plugin to add authentication to your API. Prior to the addition of this plugin, all requests to your API would be proxied upstream. Once you add and configure this plugin, only requests with the correct credentials will be proxied—all other requests will be rejected by Kong, thus protecting your upstream service from unauthorized use.
1. Configure the Basic Auth Plugin for your API
Issue the following cURL request on the previously created API named
example-api
:
$ curl -i -X POST \
--url http://localhost:8001/apis/example-api/plugins/ \
--data 'name=basic-auth'
--data "config.hide_credentials=true"
Or, add your first plugin via Kong Manager on the “Plugins” page:
2. Verify that the Plugin is Properly Configured
Issue the following cURL request to verify that the basic-auth plugin was properly configured on the API:
$ curl -i -X GET \
--url http://localhost:8000/ \
--header 'Host: example.com'
Since you did not specify the required header or parameter, the response should
be 401 Unauthorized
:
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
...
{
"message": "No API key found in request"
}
Next Steps
Now that you’ve configured the basic-auth plugin, let’s learn to add Consumers to your API so we can continue proxying requests through Kong.
Go to Adding Consumers ›