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decK

Manage Konnect and Kong Gateway configuration declaratively

decK helps manage Kong’s configuration in a declarative fashion. This means that a developer can define the desired state of Kong Gateway or Konnect – services, routes, plugins, and more – and let decK handle implementation without needing to execute each step manually, as you would with the Kong Admin API.

Features include:

Sync configuration to a running Kong cluster
diff configuration to detect any drift or manual changes
Back up your instance’s configuration
Build pipelines of automation with APIOps
Manage Kong’s configuration in a distributed way using tags, helping you split the configuration across various teams

View our introductory screencast explaining decK.

Features

Export: Export Kong configuration to a YAML configuration file. This feature is especially useful for backing up Kong’s configuration.
Import: Populate Kong’s database using a previously exported or manually written configuration file.
Diff and sync capabilities: decK can diff the configuration between the provided configuration file and Kong’s database, then sync the configs based on the diff. This feature is particularly useful for detecting config drifts or manual interventions.
Reverse sync: decK also supports sync in the opposite direction, meaning that if an entity is created in Kong and isn’t added to the config file, decK will detect the change.
Configuration Generation: decK can generate gateway configurations from OpenAPI Specifications.
Configuration Transformations: decK provides multiple transformation commands to manipulate full and partial configuration files. This feature allows you to build API delivery automations, or APIOps.
Validation: decK can validate YAML files that you backup or modify to catch errors early on.
Reset: decK can completely reset Kong’s database by deleting all entities.
Parallel operations: All Admin API calls to Kong are executed in parallel using multiple threads to speed up the sync process.
Authentication with Kong: Custom HTTP headers can be injected in requests to Kong’s Admin API for authentication or authorization purposes.
Manage Kong’s config with multiple config files: Split your configuration into multiple logical files based on a shared set of tags amongst entities.
Designed to automate configuration management: decK is designed to be part of your CI pipeline, where it can push configuration to Kong and detect drifts in configuration.

Compatibility

decK is compatible with Kong Gateway (OSS) >= 1.x and Kong Enterprise >= 0.35.

References

The command line --help flag on the main command or a subcommand (like diff, sync, reset, etc.) shows the help text along with supported flags for those commands.

See a list of all commands available with decK.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Access our FAQs page.

Video: Kong Summit motivation behind decK

Harry Bagdi gave a talk on the motivation behind decK and demonstrated a few key features of decK at Kong Summit 2019.

Changelog

The changelog can be found in the CHANGELOG file.

Licensing

decK is licensed with Apache License Version 2.0. Please read the LICENSE file for more details.

Security

decK does not offer to secure your Kong deployment but only configures it. It encourages you to protect your Kong Admin API implementation with authentication but doesn’t offer such a service itself.

decK’s state file can contain sensitive data such as private keys of certificates, credentials, etc. It is up to the user to manage and store the state file in a secure fashion.

If you believe that you have found a security vulnerability in decK, submit a detailed report, along with reproducible steps to security@konghq.com.

Get help

One of the design goals of decK is to deliver a good developer experience. To get help, use the following resources:

--help flag gives you the necessary help in the terminal itself and should solve most of your problems.
If you still need help, open a Github issue to ask your question.
decK has very wide adoption by Kong’s community and you can seek help from the larger community at Kong Nation.

Report a bug

If you believe you have run into a bug with decK, open a Github issue.

If you think you’ve found a security issue with decK, read the Security section.