Basic Authentication

Add Basic Authentication to a Service or a Route with username and password protection. The plugin will check for valid credentials in the Proxy-Authorization and Authorization header (in this order).

Terminology

• plugin: a plugin executing actions inside Kong before or after a request has been proxied to the upstream API.
• Service: the Kong entity representing an external upstream API or microservice.
• Route: the Kong entity representing a way to map downstream requests to upstream services.
• upstream service: this refers to your own API/service sitting behind Kong, to which client requests are forwarded.

Configuration

This plugin is compatible with requests with the following protocols:

• http
• https

This plugin is partially compatible with DB-less mode.

Enabling the plugin on a Service

With a database

Configure this plugin on a Service by making the following request:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/services/{service}/plugins \
    --data "name=basic-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true"

Without a database

Configure this plugin on a Service by adding this section do your declarative configuration file:

plugins:
- name: basic-auth
  service: {service}
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true

{service} is the id or name of the Service that this plugin configuration will target.

Enabling the plugin on a Route

With a database

Configure this plugin on a Route with:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/routes/{route}/plugins \
    --data "name=basic-auth"  \
    --data "config.hide_credentials=true"

Without a database

Configure this plugin on a Route by adding this section do your declarative configuration file:

plugins:
- name: basic-auth
  route: {route}
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true

{route} is the id or name of the Route that this plugin configuration will target.

Global plugins

• Using a database, all plugins can be configured using the http://kong:8001/plugins/ endpoint.
• Without a database, all plugins can be configured via the plugins: entry on the declarative configuration file.

A plugin which is not associated to any Service, Route or Consumer (or API, if you are using an older version of Kong) is considered "global", and will be run on every request. Read the Plugin Reference and the Plugin Precedence sections for more information.

Parameters

Here's a list of all the parameters which can be used in this plugin's configuration:

Once applied, any user with a valid credential can access the Service. To restrict usage to only some of the authenticated users, also add the ACL plugin (not covered here) and create whitelist or blacklist groups of users.

Usage

In order to use the plugin, you first need to create a Consumer to associate one or more credentials to. The Consumer represents a developer or an application consuming the upstream service.

Create a Consumer

You need to associate a credential to an existing Consumer object. A Consumer can have many credentials.

With a Database

To create a Consumer, you can execute the following request:

curl -d "username=user123&custom_id=SOME_CUSTOM_ID" http://kong:8001/consumers/

Without a Database

Your declarative configuration file will need to have one or more Consumers. You can create them on the consumers: yaml section:

consumers:
- username: user123
  custom_id: SOME_CUSTOM_ID

In both cases, the parameters are as described below:

If you are also using the ACL plugin and whitelists with this service, you must add the new consumer to a whitelisted group. See ACL: Associating Consumers for details.

Create a Credential

With a Database

You can provision new username/password credentials by making the following HTTP request:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/consumers/{consumer}/basic-auth \
    --data "username=Aladdin" \
    --data "password=OpenSesame"

Without a Database

You can add credentials on your declarative config file on the basicauth_credentials yaml entry:

basicauth_credentials:
- consumer: {consumer}
  username: Aladdin
  password: OpenSesame

In both cases, the fields / parameters work as described below:

Using the Credential

The authorization header must be base64 encoded. For example, if the credential uses Aladdin as the username and OpenSesame as the password, then the field’s value is the base64-encoding of Aladdin:OpenSesame, or QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l.

Then the Authorization (or Proxy-Authorization) header must appear as:

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l

Simply make a request with the header:

$ curl http://kong:8000/{path matching a configured Route} \
    -H 'Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpPcGVuU2VzYW1l'

Upstream Headers

When a client has been authenticated, the plugin will append some headers to the request before proxying it to the upstream service, so that you can identify the Consumer in your code:

• X-Consumer-ID, the ID of the Consumer on Kong
• X-Consumer-Custom-ID, the custom_id of the Consumer (if set)
• X-Consumer-Username, the username of the Consumer (if set)
• X-Credential-Username, the username of the Credential (only if the consumer is not the ‘anonymous’ consumer)
• X-Anonymous-Consumer, will be set to true when authentication failed, and the ‘anonymous’ consumer was set instead.

You can use this information on your side to implement additional logic. You can use the X-Consumer-ID value to query the Kong Admin API and retrieve more information about the Consumer.

Paginate through the basic-auth Credentials

You can paginate through the basic-auth Credentials for all Consumers using the following request:

$ curl -X GET http://kong:8001/basic-auths

{
    "total": 3,
    "data": [
        {
            "created_at": 1511379926000,
            "id": "805520f6-842b-419f-8a12-d1de8a30b29f",
            "password": "37b1af03d3860acf40bd9c681aa3ef3f543e49fe",
            "username": "baz",
            "consumer": { "id": "5e52251c-54b9-4c10-9605-b9b499aedb47" }
        },
        {
            "created_at": 1511379863000,
            "id": "8edfe5c7-3151-4d92-971f-3faa5e6c5d7e",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foo",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        },
        {
            "created_at": 1511379877000,
            "id": "f11cb0ea-eacf-4a6b-baea-a0e0b519a990",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foobar",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        }
    ]
}

You can filter the list by consumer by using this other path:

$ curl -X GET http://kong:8001/consumers/{username or id}/basic-auth

{
    "total": 1,
    "data": [
        {
            "created_at": 1511379863000,
            "id": "8edfe5c7-3151-4d92-971f-3faa5e6c5d7e",
            "password": "451b06c564a06ce60874d0ea2f542fa8ed26317e",
            "username": "foo",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        }
    ]
}

username or id: The username or id of the consumer whose credentials need to be listed

Retrieve the Consumer associated with a Credential

It is possible to retrieve a Consumer associated with a basic-auth Credential using the following request:

curl -X GET http://kong:8001/basic-auths/{username or id}/consumer

{
   "created_at":1507936639000,
   "username":"foo",
   "id":"c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880"
}

username or id: The id or username property of the basic-auth Credential for which to get the associated Consumer. Note that the username accepted here is not the username property of a Consumer.