Register an Application to a Service

Along with hosting API documentation, the Dev Portal can let your developers register applications against Konnect services. Your applications can then consume those services using application-level authentication.

For example, the application can represent a mobile banking app and the services registered to the application can be a billing API, a users API, and a legal agreements API.

Prerequisites

• You have a Konnect service with at least one version in the default runtime group. Application registration is not supported for custom runtime groups.

• You have published the Konnect service to the Dev Portal.

  • To use app registration, the Dev Portal must be protected by some sort of authentication. That means you can’t have a public portal for this step. If you set your Dev Portal to public, disable the setting and create a developer account.

Enable app registration

1. From the Service Hub, open a service version.

2. From the Actions dropdown menu, select Enable app registration.

3. Accept the key-auth setting, toggle Auto-Approve to enable it, then click Enable.

   Application registration uses key authentication (key-auth) by default. If you have integrated the Dev Portal with an IdP, you can also select openid-connect. For the purpose of this example, we’re using the simpler key-auth option, which doesn’t required any external services.

   With Auto Approve enabled, any developers trying to register their applications against this service will be approved automatically. If you leave it off, you have to approve each registration request manually.

   With app registration enabled, all versions of this service now include read-only entries for the acl and key-auth plugins, and the service is now available for registration from the Dev Portal.

Create an application

Link an application to a published service.

1. Log into the Konnect Dev Portal.

   You can always find your Dev Portal URL under the Dev Portal menu.

   Remember, the Dev Portal doesn’t share credentials with your Konnect account.

2. In the Konnect Dev Portal, click My Apps from the dropdown menu in the upper right.

3. On the My Apps page, click the New App button.

4. Fill out the form with your application name, reference ID, and description. The reference ID must be unique.

5. Click Create to save and see your new application’s detail page.

Register the application

1. From your Dev Portal account, open the Catalog from the top menu and click on a service tile.

2. Choose the version of the service you want to use and click Register.

   If you don’t see the registration button, that means this version doesn’t have application registration enabled.

3. Select the application you want to register from the list.

4. Click Request Access.

   This opens the application’s details page. If auto approval is enabled, the service appears with the status Approved.

Generate a key auth credential

1. In the Authentication pane of the application detail page, click Generate Credential.

2. Test the generated credential by making a call to the service the application is registered with using your generated API key:

   curl -i -X GET http://localhost:8000/mock \
    -H 'apikey: {API_KEY}'
   

   Use this key in any applications that need to access this service.

Summary and next steps

In this topic, you:

• Enabled application registration for the a service
• Created an application through the Dev Portal and registered it against your service
• Generated an API key for the application and made a call using this key

For next steps, check out some of the other things you can do in Kong Konnect:

• If you have existing Kong Gateway configuration you want to use, import Kong Gateway entities into Kong Konnect
• Enable plugins on a service or a route
• Manage your teams and roles