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Kong Mesh with Docker

To install and run Kong Mesh on Docker:

Download Kong Mesh
Run Kong Mesh
Verify the Installation

Finally, you can follow the Quickstart to take it from here and continue your Kong Mesh journey.

The official Docker images are used by default in the Kubernetes distributions.

Prerequisites

You have a license for Kong Mesh.

1. Download Kong Mesh

Kong Mesh provides the following Docker images for all of its executables, hosted on Docker Hub:

kuma-cp: at kong/kuma-cp:1.9.8
kuma-dp: at kong/kuma-dp:1.9.8
kumactl: at kong/kumactl:1.9.8
kuma-prometheus-sd: at kong/kuma-prometheus-sd:1.9.8

Note: Kong Mesh also has UBI images, image names are prefixed with ubi. For example kong/ubi-kuma-cp instead of kong/kuma-cp.

docker pull each image that you need. For example:

docker pull kong/kuma-cp:1.9.8

2. Run Kong Mesh

Run the control plane with:

docker run \
  -p 5681:5681 \
  -v /path/to/license.json:/license.json \
  -e "KMESH_LICENSE_PATH=/license.json" \
  kong/kuma-cp:2.9.1 run

Where /path/to/license.json is the path to a valid Kong Mesh license file on the host that will be mounted as /license.json into the container.

This example will run Kong Mesh in standalone mode for a flat deployment, but there are more advanced deployment modes like multi-zone.

This runs Kong Mesh with a memory backend, but you can use a persistent storage like PostgreSQL by updating the conf/kuma-cp.conf file.

3. Verify the Installation

Now that Kong Mesh (kuma-cp) is running, you can access the control plane using either the GUI, the HTTP API, or the CLI:

GUI (Read-Only)

HTTP API (Read & Write)

kumactl (Read & Write)

Kong Mesh ships with a read-only GUI that you can use to retrieve Kong Mesh resources. By default, the GUI listens on the API port 5681.

To access Kong Mesh, navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681/gui to see the GUI.

Kong Mesh ships with a read and write HTTP API that you can use to perform operations on Kong Mesh resources. By default, the HTTP API listens on port 5681.

To access Kong Mesh, navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681 to see the HTTP API.

You can use the kumactl CLI to perform read and write operations on Kong Mesh resources. The kumactl binary is a client to the Kong Mesh HTTP API. For example:

docker run \
  --net="host" \
  kong/kumactl:2.9.1 kumactl get meshes

NAME          mTLS      METRICS      LOGGING   TRACING
default       off       off          off       off

Or, you can enable mTLS on the default Mesh with:

$ echo "type: Mesh
name: default
mtls:
  enabledBackend: ca-1
  backends:
  - name: ca-1
    type: builtin" | docker run -i --net="host" kong/kumactl:1.9.8 kumactl apply -f -

This runs kumactl from the Docker container on the same network as the host, but most likely you want to download a compatible version of Kong Mesh for the machine where you will be executing the commands.

See the individual installation pages for your OS to download and extract kumactl to your machine:

You will notice that Kong Mesh automatically creates a Mesh entity with the name default.

4. Quickstart

To start using Kong Mesh, see the quickstart guide for Universal deployments. If you are entirely using Docker, you may also be interested in checking out the Kubernetes quickstart as well.