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Kong Mesh with Windows

To install and run Kong Mesh on Windows:

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.

Tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.

Note: Transparent proxying is not supported on Windows.

1. Download Kong Mesh

To run Kong Mesh on Windows you can choose among different installation methods:

PowerShell Script

Manually

Run the following script in PowerShell to automatically detect the operating system and download Kong Mesh:

Invoke-Expression ([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/installer.ps1).Content))

You can also download the distribution manually.

Then extract the archive with:

tar xvzf kong-mesh-1.9.8-windows-amd64.tar.gz

2. Run Kong Mesh

Once downloaded, you will find the contents of Kong Mesh in the kong-mesh-1.9.8 folder. In this folder, you will find — among other files — the bin directory that stores all the executables for Kong Mesh.

Navigate to the bin folder:

cd kong-mesh-1.9.8/bin

Then, run the control plane with:

KMESH_LICENSE_PATH=/path/to/file/license.json kuma-cp run

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

We suggest adding the kumactl executable to your PATH so that it’s always available in every working directory (PowerShell as Administrator):

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\Windows\kumactl.exe -Target .\kumactl.exe

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 has been installed, 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:

$ 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" | kumactl apply -f -

You can configure kumactl to point to any remote kuma-cp instance by running:

$ kumactl config control-planes add \
--name=XYZ \
--address=http://{address-to-mesh}:5681

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

4. Quickstart

The Kuma quickstart documentation is fully compatible with Kong Mesh, except that you are running Kong Mesh binaries instead of the Kuma binaries.

To start using Kong Mesh, see the quickstart guide for Universal deployments.