In order to explore the capabilities of Kong Gatway, you’ll need one to experiment with. This guide helps you quickly deploy Kong using Docker which is the easiest way to get started. This guide’s purpose is not to provide a production like deployment or deep explanation, rather to simply get you a running gateway as fast as possible.

Prerequisites

These instructions should be compatible on many systems, but have only been tested on the following system and shell:

  • macOS 12.4
  • zsh 5.8.1

This guide assumes each of the following tools are installed locally.

  • Docker is used to run Kong and the supporting database locally. This guide has been tested with version 20.10.17.
  • curl is used to send requests to the gateway. Most systems come with curl pre-installed.
  • make is used to run commands to deploy Kong and the supporting database to Docker. Most systems come with make pre-installed.

Steps

In order to get started quickly, you’ll download a Makefile which contains commands to run Kong, it’s supporting database, and an example service to work with. Then we’ll interact with the gateway to ensure it has been started properly.

Run each of the following commands in order.

Create and change into a folder to work out of:

mkdir -p kong && cd kong

Download the Makefile:

curl -L spurgeon.dev/make-kong --output Makefile

Run Kong:

make kong

Docker is now downloading and running the Kong Gateway and supporting database. Additionally, the Makefile bootstraps the database and installs a mock service to experiment with. Depending on your internet download speeds, this command should complete relatively quickly, and once you have the images cached locally, subsequent usage of this guide will complete much faster.

Once Kong is available, you will see:

kong is up

Test the Kong Admin API on port 8001 with the following:

curl http://localhost:8001

You should see a large JSON reponse from the gateway.

Test that the gateway is proxying data by making a mock request on port 8000:

curl http://localhost:8000/mock/requests

You should see a JSON response from the mock service with various information.

What’s next?

You now have a Kong gateway running locally. Kong has a tremendous amount of capabilities to help you manage, configure and route requests to your APIs.