PermalinkStart Kong Gateway (OSS)

Before you start: Make sure you've installed Kong — It should only take a minute!

In this section, you’ll learn how to manage your Kong instance. First, we’ll have you start Kong in order to give you access to the RESTful Admin interface, through which you manage your Services, Routes, Consumers, and more. Data sent through the Admin API is stored in Kong’s datastore (Kong supports PostgreSQL and Cassandra).

Permalink1. Start Kong Gateway

Issue the following command to prepare your datastore by running the Kong migrations:

$ kong migrations bootstrap [-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.

Permalink2. Verify that Kong 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.
:8001 on which the Admin API used to configure Kong listens.
:8444 on which the Admin API listens for HTTPS traffic.

Permalink3. Stop Kong

As needed you can stop the Kong process by issuing the following command:

$ kong stop

Permalink4. Reload Kong

Issue the following command to reload Kong without downtime:

$ kong reload

PermalinkNext Steps

Now that you have Kong running you can interact with the Admin API.

To begin, go to Configuring a Service ›