Kong dashboard

The open source version of Kong only contains the API gateway and doesn’t provide any user interface. But what if you want to browse the current settings of your Kong instance?

You could rely on the AdminAPI and get all information from it. But this would lead to exposing the AdminAPI endpoint to the world. Additionally its not very convenient to read the information you are interested in from a JSON document. Especially when you have multiple services, plugins or routes configured.

Luckily the open source community has built user interfaces like Konga and Kong Dashboard. In this tutorial we will use Kong Dashboard as it doesn’t require a database.

Add a service

To add the Kong Dashboard to our setup we only need to add one service to our docker-compose.yaml file:

  kong-dashboard:
    container_name: kong-dashboard
    image: pgbi/kong-dashboard:v3
    restart: always
    networks:
      - kong-rover-demo
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    command: (1)
      - "start"
      - "--kong-url"
      - "http://kong:8001"

1	These are the parameters the Kong Dashboard is started with. The `--kong-url` parameter points to the gateway inside the Docker network.

Once you have started the services again you can access the dashboard.

Please keep in mind that you can’t change anything. This dashboard is readonly as the AdminAPI is. The only way to change the configuration is using a new Declarative Configuration.

After playing around with the dashboard you may want to stop the services and continue with the next step.

Continue to the next section.