5-Minute Quickstart
Introduction
In this section, you’ll learn how to manage your Kong Enterprise instance. First, you’ll start Kong to give you access to the RESTful Admin API and the easy-to-use Kong Manager, through which you’ll manage your APIs, consumers, and more. Configuration changes made through the Admin API and Kong Manager are stored in Kong’s datastore (Kong supports PostgreSQL and Cassandra).
The easiest way to start using Kong Enterprise is by following our Docker installation instructions. Alternately, you can install and run without containers by following our CentOS or Amazon Linux instructions.
1. Start Kong Enterprise
A Super Admin account is required to secure the Admin API with RBAC or Kong Manager with an authentication plugin. The Super Admin account is created during database migrations.
To set up the first account:
-
Set a password for the Super Admin. This environment variable must be present in the environment where database migrations will run.
$ export KONG_PASSWORD=<password-only-you-know>
This creates a user,
kong_admin
, and a password that can be used to log in to Kong Manager or to make Admin API requests when RBAC is enabled.Note: only one Super Admin may be created using this method, and only on a fresh installation with an empty database. Future migrations will not update the password or create additional Super Admins. To add additional Super Admins it is necessary to invite a new user as a Super Admin in Kong Manager.
-
Issue the following command to prepare your datastore by running the Kong migrations:
$ kong migrations up [-c /path/to/kong.conf]
You should see a message that tells you Kong has successfully migrated your database. If not, you probably incorrectly configured your database connection settings in your configuration file.
-
Now let’s start Kong:
$ kong start [-c /path/to/kong.conf]
Note: the CLI accepts a configuration option (-c /path/to/kong.conf
)
allowing you to point to your own configuration.
2. Verify that Kong Enterprise has Started Successfully
If everything went well, you should see a message (Kong started
)
informing you that Kong is running.
By default Kong listens on the following ports:
:8000
on which Kong listens for incoming HTTP traffic from your clients, and forwards it to your upstream services.:8443
on which Kong listens for incoming HTTPS traffic. This port has a similar behavior as the:8000
port, except that it expects HTTPS traffic only. This port can be disabled via the configuration file.:8003
on which Kong listens for Kong Dev Portal GUI traffic— if the Dev Portal is enabled.:8004
on which Kong listens for Kong Dev Portal/files
traffic—if the Dev Portal is enabled.:8001
on which the Admin API listens.:8444
on which the Admin API listens for HTTPS traffic.:8002
on which Kong Manager listens.:8445
on which Kong Manager listens for HTTPS traffic.
3. Stop Kong Enterprise
As needed you can stop the Kong process by issuing the following command:
$ kong stop
4. Reload Kong Enterprise
Issue the following command to reload Kong without downtime:
$ kong reload
Next Steps
Now that you have Kong Enterprise running you can interact with the Admin API and Kong Manager.
To begin, go to Configuring a Service ›