PermalinkAdding your API

PermalinkIntroduction

Before you start:

Make sure you've installed Kong — It should only take a minute!
Make sure you've started Kong.

In this section, you’ll be adding your API to the Kong layer. This is the first step to having Kong manage your API. For purposes of this Getting Started guide, we suggest adding the Mockbin API to Kong, as Mockbin is helpful for learning how Kong proxies your API requests.

Kong exposes a RESTful Admin API on port :8001 for managing the configuration of your Kong instance or cluster.

Permalink1. Add your API using the Admin API

Issue the following cURL request to add your first API ([Mockbin][mockbin])
to Kong:

```bash
$ curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/apis/ \
  --data 'name=example-api' \
  --data 'hosts=example.com' \
  --data 'upstream_url=http://mockbin.org'
```

Permalink2. Verify that your API has been added

You should see a similar response from that request:

```http
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/json
Connection: keep-alive

{
  "created_at": 1488830759000,
  "hosts": [
      "example.com"
  ],
  "http_if_terminated": false,
  "https_only": false,
  "id": "6378122c-a0a1-438d-a5c6-efabae9fb969",
  "name": "example-api",
  "preserve_host": false,
  "retries": 5,
  "strip_uri": true,
  "upstream_connect_timeout": 60000,
  "upstream_read_timeout": 60000,
  "upstream_send_timeout": 60000,
  "upstream_url": "http://mockbin.org"
}
```

Kong is now aware of your API and ready to proxy requests.

Permalink3. Forward your requests through Kong

Issue the following cURL request to verify that Kong is properly forwarding
requests to your API. Note that [by default][proxy-port] Kong handles proxy
requests on port `:8000`:

```bash
$ curl -i -X GET \
  --url http://localhost:8000/ \
  --header 'Host: example.com'
```

A successful response means Kong is now forwarding requests made to
`http://localhost:8000` to the `upstream_url` we configured in step #1,
and is forwarding the response back to us. Kong knows to do this through
the header defined in the above cURL request:

<ul>
  <li><strong>Host: &lt;given host></strong></li>
</ul>

PermalinkNext Steps

Now that you’ve added your API to Kong, let’s learn how to enable plugins.

Go to Enabling Plugins ›