You are browsing documentation for an older version.
See the latest documentation here.
Expose your Services with Kong Gateway
In this topic, you’ll learn how to expose your Services using Routes.
If you are following the Getting Started workflow, make sure you have completed
Prepare to Administer Kong Gateway
before moving on.
If you are not following the Getting Started workflow, make sure you have
Kong Gateway installed and started.
What are Services and Routes?
Service and Route objects let you expose your services to clients with
Kong Gateway. When configuring access to your API, you’ll start by specifying a
Service. In Kong Gateway, a Service is an entity representing an external
upstream API or microservice — for example, a data transformation
microservice, a billing API, and so on.
The main attribute of a Service is its URL, where the service listens for
requests. You can specify the URL with a single string, or by specifying its
protocol, host, port, and path individually.
Before you can start making requests against the Service, you will need to add
a Route to it. Routes determine how (and if) requests are sent to their Services
after they reach Kong Gateway. A single Service can have many Routes.
After configuring the Service and the Route, you’ll be able to start making
requests through Kong Gateway.
This diagram illustrates the flow of requests and responses being routed through
the Service to the backend API.
Add a Service
For the purpose of this example, you’ll create a Service pointing to the httpbin
API. Httpbin is an “echo” type public website that returns requests back to the
requester as responses. This visualization will be helpful for learning how Kong
Gateway proxies API requests.
Kong Gateway exposes the RESTful Admin API on port 8001
. The gateway’s
configuration, including adding Services and Routes, is done through requests to
the Admin API.
Using Kong Manager
Using the Admin API
Using decK (YAML)
-
On the Workspaces tab in Kong Manager, scroll to the Workspace section and
click the default workspace.
This example uses the default workspace, but you can also create a new
workspace, or use an existing workspace.
-
Scroll down to Services and click Add a Service.
-
In the Create Service dialog, enter the name example_service
and the
URL https://httpbin.konghq.com
.
-
Click Create.
The service is created, and the page automatically redirects back to the
example_service
overview page.
curl -i -X POST http://localhost:8001/services \
--data name=example_service \
--data url='https://httpbin.konghq.com'
http POST http://localhost:8001/services \
name=example_service \
url='https://httpbin.konghq.com'
If the service is created successfully, you’ll get a 201 success message.
Verify the service’s endpoint:
curl -i http://localhost:8001/services/example_service
http http://localhost:8001/services/example_service
-
In the kong.yaml
file you exported in
Prepare to Administer Kong Gateway,
define a Service with the name example_service
and the URL
https://httpbin.konghq.com
:
_format_version: "1.1"
services:
- host: httpbin.konghq.com
name: example_service
port: 80
protocol: http
-
Save the file. From your terminal, sync the configuration to update your
gateway instance:
The message should show that you’re creating a service:
creating service example_service
Summary:
Created: 1
Updated: 0
Deleted: 0
Add a Route
For the Service to be accessible through the API gateway, you need to add a
Route to it.
Using Kong Manager
Using the Admin API
Using decK (YAML)
-
From the example_service
overview page, scroll down to the Routes section
and click Add Route.
The Create Route dialog displays with the Service field auto-populated with
the Service name and ID number. This field is required.
Note: If the Service field is not automatically populated, click
Services in the left navigation pane. Find your Service, click the
clipboard icon next to the id field, then go back to the Create Route
page and paste it into the Service field.
- Enter a name for the Route, and at least one of the following fields: Host,
Methods, or Paths. For this example, use the following:
- For Name, enter
mocking
.
- For Path(s), click Add Path and enter
/mock
.
- Click Create.
The Route is created and you are automatically redirected back to the
example_service
overview page. The new Route appears under the Routes section.
Define a Route (/mock
) for the Service (example_service
) with a specific
path that clients need to request. Note at least one of the hosts, paths, or
methods must be set for the Route to be matched to the service.
curl -i -X POST http://localhost:8001/services/example_service/routes \
--data 'paths[]=/mock' \
--data name=mocking
http :8001/services/example_service/routes \
paths:='["/mock"]' \
name=mocking
A 201
message indicates the Route was created successfully.
-
Paste the following into the kong.yaml
file, under the entry for
example_service
:
routes:
- name: mocking
paths:
- /mock
strip_path: true
Your file should now look like this:
_format_version: "1.1"
services:
- host: httpbin.konghq.com
name: example_service
port: 80
protocol: http
routes:
- name: mocking
paths:
- /mock
strip_path: true
-
Sync the configuration:
-
(Optional) You can update your local file with the new configuration:
Be careful! Any subsequent deck dump
will
overwrite the existing kong.yaml
file. Create backups as needed.
Alternatively, you will also see this configuration in the diff that decK
shows when you’re syncing a change to the configuration.
You’ll notice that both the Service and Route now have parameters that you
did not explicitly set. These are default parameters that every Service and
Route are created with:
services:
- connect_timeout: 60000
host: httpbin.konghq.com
name: example_service
port: 80
protocol: http
read_timeout: 60000
retries: 5
write_timeout: 60000
routes:
- name: mocking
paths:
- /mock
path_handling: v0
preserve_host: false
protocols:
- http
- https
regex_priority: 0
strip_path: true
https_redirect_status_code: 426
You can do this after any deck sync
to see Kong Gateway’s most
recent configuration.
The rest of this guide continues using the simplified version of the
configuration file without performing a deck dump
for every step, to keep
it easy to follow.
Verify the Route is forwarding requests to the Service
By default, Kong Gateway handles proxy requests on port 8000
. The proxy is often referred to as the data plane.
From a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:8000/mock/anything
.
Summary and next steps
In this section, you:
- Added a Service named
example_service
with a URL of https://httpbin.konghq.com
.
- Added a Route named
/mock
.
- This means if an HTTP request is sent to the Kong Gateway node on
port
8000
(the proxy port) and it matches route /mock
, then that request is
sent to https://httpbin.konghq.com
.
- Abstracted a backend/upstream service and put a route of your choice on the
front end, which you can now give to clients to make requests.
Next, go on to learn about enforcing rate limiting.