Kong is a cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice Abstraction Layer (also known as an API Gateway or API Middleware). Made available as an open-source project in 2015, its core values are high performance and extensibility.
Actively maintained, Kong is widely used in production at companies ranging from startups to Global 5000 as well as government organizations.
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If you are building for the web, mobile, or IoT (Internet of Things) you will likely end up needing common functionality to run your actual software. Kong can help by acting as a gateway (or a sidecar) for microservices requests while providing load balancing, logging, authentication, rate-limiting, transformations, and more through plugins.
Kong has been built with the following leading principles:
For more info about plugins and integrations, you can check out the Kong Hub.
Kong comes in many shapes. While this repository contains its core's source code, other repos are also under active development:
You can find every supported distribution at the official installation page.
We encourage community contributions to Kong. To make sure it is a smooth experience (both for you and for the Kong team), please read CONTRIBUTING.md, DEVELOPER.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and COPYRIGHT before you start.
If you are planning on developing on Kong, you'll need a development
installation. The next
branch holds the latest unreleased source code.
You can read more about writing your own plugins in the Plugin Development Guide, or browse an online version of Kong's source code documentation in the Plugin Development Kit (PDK) Reference.
For a quick start with custom plugin development, check out Pongo and the plugin template explained in detail below.
You can use Docker / docker-compose and a mounted volume to develop Kong by following the instructions on Kong/kong-build-tools.
Gojira is a CLI that uses docker-compose internally to make the necessary setup of containers to get all dependencies needed to run a particular branch of Kong locally, as well as easily switching across versions, configurations and dependencies. It has support for running Kong in Hybrid (CP/DP) mode, testing migrations, running a Kong cluster, among other features.
Pongo is another CLI like Gojira, but specific for plugin development. It is docker-compose based and will create local test environments including all dependencies. Core features are running tests, integrated linter, config initialization, CI support, and custom dependencies.
The plugin template provides a basic plugin and is considered a best-practices plugin repository. When writing custom plugins we strongly suggest you start by using this repository as a starting point. It contains the proper file structures, configuration files, and CI setup to get up and running quickly. This repository seamlessly integrates with Pongo.
You can use a Vagrant box running Kong and Postgres that you can find at Kong/kong-vagrant.
Kong mostly is an OpenResty application made of Lua source files, but also requires some additional third-party dependencies. We recommend installing those by following the source install instructions at https://docs.konghq.com/install/source/.
Instead of following the second step (Install Kong), clone this repository and install the latest Lua sources instead of the currently released ones:
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong
$ cd kong/
# you might want to switch to the development branch. See CONTRIBUTING.md
$ git checkout next
# install the Lua sources
$ luarocks make
Check out the development section of the default configuration file for properties to tweak in order to ease the development process for Kong.
Modifying the lua_package_path
and lua_package_cpath
directives will allow Kong to find your custom plugin's source code wherever it
might be in your system.
Install the development dependencies (busted, luacheck) with:
$ make dev
Kong relies on three test suites using the busted testing library:
The first can simply be run after installing busted and running:
$ make test
However, the integration and plugins tests will spawn a Kong instance and
perform their tests against it. As so, consult/edit the spec/kong_tests.conf
configuration file to make your test instance point to your Postgres/Cassandra
servers, depending on your needs.
You can run the integration tests (assuming both Postgres and Cassandra are
running and configured according to spec/kong_tests.conf
) with:
$ make test-integration
And the plugins tests with:
$ make test-plugins
Finally, all suites can be run at once by simply using:
$ make test-all
Consult the run_tests.sh script for a more advanced example usage of the tests suites and the Makefile.
Finally, a very useful tool in Lua development (as with many other dynamic
languages) is performing static linting of your code. You can use luacheck
(installed with make dev
) for this:
$ make lint
When developing, you can use the Makefile
for doing the following operations:
Name | Description |
---|---|
install |
Install the Kong luarock globally |
dev |
Install development dependencies |
lint |
Lint Lua files in kong/ and spec/
|
test |
Run the unit tests suite |
test-integration |
Run the integration tests suite |
test-plugins |
Run the plugins test suite |
test-all |
Run all unit + integration + plugins tests at once |
If you are working in a large organization you should learn more about Kong Enterprise.
Copyright 2016-2020 Kong Inc.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.