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Kong Gateway 2.8 Increases Security and Simplifies API Management.  —Learn More →
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On this page
  • Prerequisites
  • Download and install
  • Prepare your configs
    • Using a database
    • Without a database
  • Run Kong Gateway
  • Next steps
Kong Gateway
2.8.x (latest)
  • Kong Konnect Platform
  • Kong Gateway
  • Install and run

Install Kong Gateway on macOS

See the MacOS Homebrew formula

(latest version: 2.8.1)

Kong Gateway (OSS) is licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.

Prerequisites

You have a supported system with root or root-equivalent access.

Download and install

Install Kong Gateway:

Use the Homebrew package manager to add Kong as a tap and install it:

brew tap kong/kong
brew install kong

Prepare your configs

Kong can run either with or without a database.

When using a database, you will use the kong.conf configuration file for setting Kong’s configuration properties at start-up and the database as storage of all configured entities, such as the Routes and Services to which Kong proxies.

When not using a database, you will use kong.conf’s configuration properties and a kong.yml file for specifying the entities as a declarative configuration.

Using a database

Deprecation warning: Cassandra as a backend database for Kong Gateway is deprecated. This means the feature will eventually be removed.
Our target for Cassandra removal is the Kong Gateway 4.0 release. Starting with the Kong Gateway 3.0 release, some new features might not be supported with Cassandra.

Configure Kong so it can connect to your database. Kong supports PostgreSQL and Cassandra as datastores, and can also run in DB-less mode

  1. If you are using Postgres, provision a database and a user before starting Kong:

     CREATE USER kong; CREATE DATABASE kong OWNER kong;
    
  2. Run the Kong migrations:

     kong migrations bootstrap [-c /path/to/kong.conf]
    

    By default, Kong is configured to communicate with a local Postgres instance. If you are using Cassandra, or need to modify any settings, download the kong.conf.default file and adjust it as necessary.

  3. As root, add kong.conf.default to /etc:

     sudo mkdir -p /etc/kong
     sudo cp kong.conf.default /etc/kong/kong.conf
    

Without a database

If you are going to run Kong in DB-less mode, you should start by generating a declarative config file.

  1. Generate a kong.yml file in your current folder using the following command:

     kong config init
    

    The file contains instructions about how to populate it.

  2. Edit your kong.conf file. Set the database option to off and the declarative_config option to the path of your kong.yml file:

     database = off
     declarative_config = /path/to/kong.yml
    

Run Kong Gateway

  1. Start Kong Gateway:

     kong start [-c /path/to/kong.conf]
    
  2. Verify that Kong Gateway is running:

    curl -i http://localhost:8001/
    

Next steps

Check out Kong Gateway’s series of Getting Started guides to get the most out of Kong Gateway.

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