PermalinkAdding Consumers

In the last section, you learned how to add plugins to Kong, in this section you’re going to learn how to add consumers to your Kong instances. Consumers are associated to individuals using your Service, and can be used for tracking, access management, and more.

Note: This section assumes you have enabled the key-auth plugin. If you haven’t, you can either enable the plugin or skip steps two and three.

Permalink1. Create a Consumer through the RESTful API

Let’s create a user named Jason by issuing the following request:

curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/consumers/ \
  --data "username=Jason"

You should see a response similar to the one below:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/json
Connection: keep-alive

{
  "username": "Jason",
  "created_at": 1428555626000,
  "id": "bbdf1c48-19dc-4ab7-cae0-ff4f59d87dc9"
}

Congratulations! You’ve just added your first consumer to Kong.

Note: Kong also accepts a custom_id parameter when creating consumers to associate a consumer with your existing user database.

Permalink2. Provision key credentials for your Consumer

Now, we can create a key for our recently created consumer Jason by issuing the following request:

curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/consumers/Jason/key-auth/ \
  --data 'key=ENTER_KEY_HERE'

Permalink3. Verify that your Consumer credentials are valid

You can now issue the following request to verify that the credentials of your Jason Consumer is valid:

curl -i -X GET \
  --url http://localhost:8000 \
  --header "Host: example.com" \
  --header "apikey: ENTER_KEY_HERE"

PermalinkNext Steps

Read more about the following related topics:

• Configuration file Reference
• CLI Reference
• Proxy Reference
• Admin API Reference
• Clustering Reference

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