Add service and route

To make our rover-api service accessible again, we will have to tell Kong two things:

that the API exists and how kong can call it
to add an endpoint that is accessible from outside the (docker)network

All this is done by adding a few lines to the configuration file we just created.

Add a service

Kong and our API are both running in containers that belong to the same network. So from the perspective of Kong the API is available on a host named rover-api on port 8080. So we add the following to our configuration:

services:
  - name: rover-api
    host: rover-api
    port: 80
    path: /rovers

Add a route

Now that Kong knows where to find our API we can add a route Kong will listen on. The following lines will add a route that forwards all requests made to http://<Kong-Server>/rovers that have one of the verbs ("GET","POST","PUT","DELETE") to our API.

We don’t need to reference the service, as we can define the route nested within the service.

Make sure you use the right indention in the yml file.

    routes:
      - name: rover-api-route
        paths:
          - /rovers
        methods:
          - GET
          - POST
          - PUT
          - DELETE

Call the API

Start the services again with:

docker-compose up -d

Now the API can be called again with the same (cURL-)commands we used when we only had the API deployed. But now all communication is routed through our API gateway. We can even prove this by adding the -v option to the cURL commands to display the headers returned. These headers are added by the Kong API gateway:

< X-Kong-Upstream-Latency: 1
< X-Kong-Proxy-Latency: 0
< Via: kong/1.4.2

Stop the services again to add some more lines to the configuration.

docker-compose down

Continue to the next section.