About Self-Hosted Dev Portal

In Kong Konnect, you have two out-of-the-box solutions for your Dev Portal: a cloud-hosted Dev Portal with Konnect or a self-hosted, open source Dev Portal.

• Cloud-hosted Dev Portal in Konnect: Your Dev Portal is hosted for you and it simplifies your deployment experience.
• Self-hosted, open source Dev Portal: Provides all the same features as the cloud-hosted portal, but also gives you control over your hosting platform.

You can use the open source Dev Portal to display your APIs to developers on a self-hosted website. This page explains the benefits of using a self-hosted Dev Portal, a high-level overview of how the self-hosted portal works, and how to enable it.

Self-hosted Dev Portal benefits

There are several benefits to keep in mind when deciding whether to use a Konnect-hosted or self-hosted Dev Portal. The self-hosted portal provides the following benefits:

• Fully customizable: Use the example frontend Dev Portal application as a starting point and then customize Dev Portal for your needs using the Portal API. You can also integrate the API specs with workflows tailored to your organization’s own processes.
• Hosting platform choice: When you self-host, you also get to choose which hosting platform you use to deploy your Dev Portal.
• Range of customization options: With the self-hosted Dev Portal, you determine how much you want to customize. You can choose to use the example application right out of the box, or you can use the Portal API and Portal SDK for more fine-grained control.

How the self-hosted Dev Portal works

The following diagram explains how the self-hosted Dev Portal works by using the example frontend application:

Figure 1: Diagram that shows how the example frontend application communicates with the developer’s browser and Konnect. The self-hosted Dev Portal is hosted in your infrastructure and the application is served to the developer browser. The developer browser communicates with the Portal API for API requests and Konnect supplies the corresponding content.

The Dev Portal API is always hosted by Konnect, no matter if you use the self-hosted or Konnect-hosted Dev Portal. The Dev Portal API maps to the Portal Domain (and optional Custom Hosted Domain, which is a CNAME). Depending on which domain settings you configure and if you are self-hosting or not, the Dev Portal UI domain will differ.

Figure 2: Diagram that shows that self-hosted and Konnect-hosted Dev Portals use different UI domains, but both use the same Konnect-hosted Dev Portal API.

Enable a self-hosted Dev Portal

You can enable the self-hosted Dev Portal through Dev Portal > Settings, then setting up a custom domain in the Portal Domain tab.

The following fields are required:

• Custom Hosted Domain
• Custom Self-Hosted UI Domain

After enabling the portal, configure your hosting provider to serve your Dev Portal. You can host it with Netlify using our instructions.

More information

Self-Host your Dev Portal with Netlify - Learn how to deploy your self-hosted Dev Portal on Netlify.