You are browsing documentation for an outdated version. See the latest documentation here.

Router Expressions Language Reference for Kong Gateway

With the release of version 3.0, Kong Gateway now ships with a new router. The new router can describe routes using a domain-specific language called Expressions. Expressions can describe routes or paths as combinations of logical operations called “predicates”. This document serves as a reference for all of the available operators and fields. If you want to learn how to configure routes using Expressions read How to configure routes using Expressions.

General design

Kong router Expressions are designed as combinations of simple comparisons called “predicates”. All predicates have one of the following form:

field op value
transformation(field) op value

Example:

http.path ^= "/prefix/"
lower(http.path) ^= "/prefix/"

Note: transformations only works on fields, it will not work on the value side of the predicate. This means you can not write:

http.path ^= lower("/preFIX/")

Predicates can be grouped with parenthesis () or logical operators ||, &&:

Example:

(http.path ^= "/prefix/" && net.port == 80) || http.method == "POST"

Types

Router expressions are strongly typed. The operators available to each field depends on the type of that field. For example, you can not perform string comparisons on a integer type field.

Available fields

Field	Description	Type
`net.protocol`	The protocol used to communicate with the downstream application.	String
`net.port`	Server end port number.	Int
`tls.sni`	Server name indication.	String
`http.method`	HTTP methods that match a route.	String
`http.host`	Lists of domains that match a route.	String
`http.path`	Normalized request path (without query parameters).	String
`http.headers.header_name`	Value of header `Header-Name`. Header names are converted to lower case, and `-` are replaced to `_`.	String
`net.src.ip`	Source IP address of incoming connection.	IpAddr
`net.src.port`	Source port number of incoming connection.	Int
`net.dst.ip`	Destination IP address of incoming connection.	IpAddr
`net.dst.port`	Destination port number of incoming connection.	Int

String

Operator	Meaning
==	Equals
!=	Not equals
~	Regex matching
^=	Prefix matching
=^	Suffix matching
contains	Contains

String transformations

Transformation	Meaning
lower()	turn the uppercase letters into lowercase

Integer

Operator	Meaning
==	Equals
!=	Not equals
>	Greater than
>=	Greater than or equal
<	Less than
<=	Less than or equal

IpAddr

Operator	Meaning
==	Equals
!=	Not equals
in	In CIDR
not in	Not in CIDR

Boolean

Operator	Meaning
&&	Logical And
`\|\|`	Logical Or