PermalinkEnabling Plugins

PermalinkIntroduction

In this section, you’ll learn how to configure Kong plugins. One of the core principles of Kong is its extensibility through plugins. Plugins allow you to easily add new features to your API or make your API easier to manage.

In the steps below you will configure the key-auth plugin to add authentication to your Service. Prior to the addition of this plugin, all requests to your Service would be proxied upstream. Once you add and configure this plugin, only requests with the correct API key(s) will be proxied - all other requests will be rejected by Kong, thus protecting your upstream service from unauthorized use.

Permalink1. Configure the key-auth plugin for the Service you configured in Kong.

Issue the following cURL request:

```bash
$ curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/services/example-service/plugins/ \
  --data 'name=key-auth'
```

**Note:** This plugin also accepts a `config.key_names` parameter, which
defaults to `['apikey']`. It is a list of headers and parameters names (both
are supported) that are supposed to contain the apikey during a request.

Permalink2. Verify that the plugin is properly configured

Issue the following cURL request to verify that the [key-auth][key-auth]
plugin was properly configured on the Service:

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

Since you did not specify the required `apikey` header or parameter, the
response should be `401 Unauthorized`:

```http
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
...

{
  "message": "No API key found in request"
}
```

PermalinkNext Steps

Now that you’ve configured the key-auth plugin lets learn how to add consumers to your Service so we can continue proxying requests through Kong.

Go to Adding Consumers ›