Automating the Dev Pipeline to Rapidly Design, Publish, and Consume APIs with Kong

This project assumes you are running in the Kong Learning Lab environment. Please reach out to your Kong Account Representative if you would like to access the course material.

This repository provides a template for creating your own end-to-end APIOps workflow leveraging the Kong API Gateway, the world's most popular API gateway. Following this workshop, you will:

• Using Insomnia's inso CLI, convert an OpenAPI specification file into an equivalent Kong Gateway configuration format.
• Apply the configuration to the Gateway using Kong's declarative configuration tool decK
• Update the Developer Portal documentation using a single API call

Here is a diagram containing the full workflow:

This repository also includes sample Github Action runner scripts (under ~/.github) that can be used to initiate the full APIOps/GitOps workflow out-of-the-box when running in Github.

The APIOps Workflow

All automation is driven by two interactions within this repository: opening a Pull Request (PR) or merging a commit to the master branch. Let's get started.

1. Generating the Configuration

The first step is to generate a Kong configuration from our OpenAPI specification file using the inso CLI. The output of this step is a declarative configuration that can be applied with deck.

To generate a declarative configuration, run:

inso generate config ./openapi/orders.yaml --type declarative -o kong.yaml

Feel free to inspect the kong.yaml file to see what the underlying configuration looks like.

2. Validating the Configuration

The second step is to validate the configuration to ensure that it contains valid syntax, and that it is ready to applied to a Kong Gateway.

To validate our generated configuration file, run:

deck validate

3. Applying the Configuration

With our configuration generated with kong.yaml, we can now apply it to our Kong instance using deck.

To apply the configuration with deck, run the commands below:

# BONUS: backup your current configuration - just to be safe
deck dump -o deck-backup.$(date +%s).yaml

# BONUS: review any changes prior to applying them
deck diff

# make it happen!
deck sync

If you have RBAC enabled, then you'll want to add a --headers "Kong-Admin-Token:yourtoken" flag to the commands above in order to authenticate.

If needed, you can scope your updates to a particular Kong workspace using the --workspace flag.

With the configuration successfully applied, you should see the changes take place immediately. Try sending a request to any available routes for verification.

4. Updating the documentation

With the runtime configuration in place, now it's time to update the API documentation. This ensures that any consumer of our API has readily available, up-to-date documentation.

To update the developer portal documentation for our service, run the following command:

curl -XPUT localhost:8001/default/files/specs/httpbin.yaml --data contents=@openapi/orders.yaml

The command above assumes you are updating the "default" workspace (noted by the /default URL prefix) with Kong running locally (noted by localhost:8001). You may need to update the command above to match your environment if you are running in a different environment.

In this example, we updated a single API in the Kong Developer Portal. While this works for this use case, we could also have used the portal CLI to update the entire developer documentation at once. If you or your team prefer following a "GitOps" or "DocOps"-based workflow, the portal CLI may provide a better alternative for updating your API documentation.

Insomnia also has built-in functionality for publishing APIs to your Kong developer portal using a graphical interface.

Extras

Enabling More Plugins

If you would like to include other plugins for your service, you can do so by adding an x- extension to the API specification matching the plugin name and configuration.

For example, to configure the rate limiting plugin:

x-kong-plugin-rate-limiting:
  enabled: true
  config:
    minute: 6
    limit_by: ip
    policy: local

The extension must start with x-kong-plugin- and then include the plugin name in kebab-case format.

You can find a list of all available plugins in the Kong documentation here.

Questions?

Issues? Questions? Problems? Concerns? Don't hesitate to reach out.