Bot Detection

Protects a Service or a Route from most common bots and has the capability of whitelisting and blacklisting custom clients.

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 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=bot-detection" 

Without a database

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

plugins:
- name: bot-detection
  service: {service}
  config: 

In both cases, {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=bot-detection" 

Without a database

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

plugins:
- name: bot-detection
  route: {route}
  config: 

In both cases, {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:

Default rules

The plugin already includes a basic list of rules that will be checked on every request. You can find this list on GitHub at https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/master/kong/plugins/bot-detection/rules.lua.