Create a centrally-managed Consumer in Konnect

Uses: Kong Gateway decK

Deployment Platform:

Prerequisites

Kong Konnect

This is a Konnect tutorial. If you don’t have a Konnect account, you can get started quickly with our onboarding wizard.

The following Konnect items are required to complete this tutorial:
- Personal access token (PAT): Create a new personal access token by opening the Konnect PAT page and selecting Generate Token.
- Control Plane Name: You can use an existing Control Plane or create a new one to use for this tutorial.
- Konnect Proxy URL: By default, a self-hosted Data Plane uses http://localhost:8000. You can set up Data Plane nodes for your Control Plane from the Gateway Manager in Konnect.

Set the personal access token, the Control Plane name, the Control Plane URL, and the Konnect proxy URL as environment variables:

 export DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN='YOUR KONNECT TOKEN'
 export DECK_KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_NAME='YOUR CONTROL PLANE NAME'
 export KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL=https://us.api.konghq.com
 export KONNECT_PROXY_URL='KONNECT PROXY URL'

Kong Gateway running

This tutorial requires Kong Gateway Enterprise. If you don’t have Kong Gateway set up yet, you can use the quickstart script with an enterprise license to get an instance of Kong Gateway running almost instantly.

Export your license to an environment variable:

 export KONG_LICENSE_DATA='LICENSE-CONTENTS-GO-HERE'

Run the quickstart script:

 curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -e KONG_LICENSE_DATA 

Once Kong Gateway is ready, you will see the following message:

 Kong Gateway Ready

decK

decK is a CLI tool for managing Kong Gateway declaratively with state files. To complete this tutorial you will first need to install decK.

Required entities

For this tutorial, you’ll need Kong Gateway entities, like Gateway Services and Routes, pre-configured. These entities are essential for Kong Gateway to function but installing them isn’t the focus of this guide. Follow these steps to pre-configure them:

Run the following command:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
services:
  - name: example-service
    url: http://httpbin.konghq.com/anything
routes:
  - name: example-route
    paths:
    - "/anything"
    service:
      name: example-service
' | deck gateway apply -

To learn more about entities, you can read our entities documentation.

Create a realm

First, export your Control Plane ID and region (for example, us) so we can use it in the request. You can find these under your Control Plane settings in Gateway Manager:

export KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_ID={control-plane-id}
export DECK_CONTROL_PLANE_REGION={region}

Centrally-managed Consumers are assigned to realms instead of Control Planes. Realms exist outside of the Control Plane.

Use the /realms endpoint to create a realm and associate it with allowed Control Planes:

curl -X POST "$KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL/v1/realms" \
     -H "Accept: application/json"\
     -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN" \
     --json '{
       "name": "prod",
       "allowed_control_planes": [
         "'$KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_ID'"
       ]
     }'

Export the ID of the realm from the response:

export DECK_REALM_ID={realm-id}

Create the centrally-managed Consumer

Use the create a Consumer endpoint to create a centrally-managed Consumer:

curl -X POST "$KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL/v1/realms/$DECK_REALM_ID/consumers" \
     -H "Accept: application/json"\
     -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN" \
     --json '{
       "username": "Ariel"
     }'

Export the ID of the Consumer from the response:

export CONSUMER_ID={consumer-id}

Create a Consumer key for authentication

Centrally-managed Consumers require a key for authentication. Configure authentication keys for Consumers using the create a key endpoint:

curl -X POST "$KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL/v1/realms/$DECK_REALM_ID/consumers/$CONSUMER_ID/keys" \
     -H "Accept: application/json"\
     -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN" \
     --json '{
       "type": "new"
     }'

Export the Consumer key from the secret field in the response:

export CONSUMER_KEY={consumer-key}

Enable authentication with the Key Authentication plugin

Consumers require authentication. Currently, you can only use the Key Auth plugin to authenticate centrally-managed Consumers. In this example, we’ll configure identity_realms on first the realm and then the Control Plane. By doing it this way, the Data Plane will first reach out to the realm. If the API key is not found in the realm, the Data Plane will look for the API key in the Control Plane config.

Enable the Key Auth plugin on the example-service:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
plugins:
  - name: key-auth
    service: example-service
    config:
      key_names:
      - apikey
      identity_realms:
      - id: "${{ env "DECK_REALM_ID" }}"
        scope: realm
        region: "${{ env "DECK_CONTROL_PLANE_REGION" }}"
      - id: 
        scope: cp
' | deck gateway apply -

identity_realms are scoped to the Control Plane by default (scope: cp). The order in which you configure the identity_realms dictates the priority in which the Data Plane attempts to authenticate the provided API keys. See identity realms precedence for more information.

Validate

After configuring the Key Authentication plugin, you can verify that it was configured correctly and is working, by sending requests with and without the API key you created for your centrally-managed Consumer.

Send a request with a valid API key:

curl -i "$KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything" \
     -H "apikey:$CONSUMER_KEY"

You will see a successful 200 response.

When we send the wrong API key, it won’t be authorized:

curl -i $KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything \
     -H "apikey:another_key"

This request returns a 401 error with the message Unauthorized.

Cleanup

Clean up Konnect environment

If you created a new control plane and want to conserve your free trial credits or avoid unnecessary charges, delete the new control plane used in this tutorial.