Control MCP tool access with Consumer and Consumer Group ACLs

This is a Konnect tutorial and requires a Konnect personal access token.

1. Create a new personal access token by opening the Konnect PAT page and selecting Generate Token.

2. Export your token to an environment variable:

    export KONNECT_TOKEN='YOUR_KONNECT_PAT'
   

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3. Run the quickstart script to automatically provision a Control Plane and Data Plane, and configure your environment:

    curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -k $KONNECT_TOKEN -e KONG_STATUS_LISTEN=0.0.0.0:8100 --deck-output
   

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   This sets up a Konnect Control Plane named quickstart, provisions a local Data Plane, and prints out the following environment variable exports:

    export DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN=$KONNECT_TOKEN
    export DECK_KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_NAME=quickstart
    export KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL=https://us.api.konghq.com
    export KONNECT_PROXY_URL='http://localhost:8000'
   

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   Copy and paste these into your terminal to configure your session.

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.

1. Export your license to an environment variable:

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

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2. Run the quickstart script:

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

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

    Kong Gateway Ready
   

Download and install Insomnia.

Download and install Insomnia.

decK is a CLI tool for managing Kong Gateway declaratively with state files. To complete this tutorial, install decK version 1.43 or later.

This guide uses deck gateway apply, which directly applies entity configuration to your Gateway instance. We recommend upgrading your decK installation to take advantage of this tool.

You can check your current decK version with deck version.

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:

1. Run the following command:

   echo '
   _format_version: "3.0"
   services:
     - name: mcp-acl-service
       url: http://host.docker.internal:3001/mcp
   routes:
     - name: mcp-acl-route
       paths:
       - "/mcp"
       service:
         name: mcp-acl-service
       protocols:
       - http
       - https
   ' | deck gateway apply -
   

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

Before using the AI MCP Proxy plugin, you need an upstream MCP-compatible HTTP server to expose. For this tutorial, we’ll use a simple Express-based MCP server that simulates a marketplace system. It provides read-only access to sample users and their orders.

The server exposes a single /mcp endpoint and registers tools instead of REST routes, including:

• list_users
• get_user
• list_orders
• list_orders_for_user
• search_orders

These tools operate on in-memory marketplace data, allowing you to test MCP behavior without connecting to a real backend.

Run the following command to clone the repository, install dependencies, build the server, and start it:

git clone https://github.com/tomek-labuk/marketplace-acl.git && \
cd marketplace-acl && \
npm install && \
npm run build && \
node dist/server.js

When the server starts, it listens at:

http://localhost:3001/mcp