PermalinkAdding Consumers

PermalinkIntroduction

Before you start:

Make sure you've installed Kong — It should only take a minute!
Make sure you've started Kong.
Also, make sure you've added your API to Kong.

In the last section, we learned how to add plugins to Kong, in this section we’re going to learn how to add consumers to your Kong instances. Consumers are associated to individuals using your API, and can be used for tracking, access management, and more.

Note: This section assumes you have enabled the keyauth plugin. If you haven’t, you can either enable the plugin or skip steps two and three.

Permalink1. Create a Consumer through the RESTful API

Lets create a user named `Jason` by issuing the following request:

```bash
$ curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/consumers/ \
  --data "username=Jason"
```

You should see a response similar to the one below:

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

{
  "username": "Jason",
  "created_at": 1428555626000,
  "id": "bbdf1c48-19dc-4ab7-cae0-ff4f59d87dc9"
}
```

Congratulations! You've just added your first consumer to Kong.

**Note:** Kong also accepts a `custom_id` parameter when [creating consumers][API-consumers] to associate a consumer with your existing user database.

Permalink2. Provision key credentials for your Consumer

Now, we can create a key for our recently created consumer `Jason` by issuing the following request:

```bash
$ curl -i -X POST \
  --url http://localhost:8001/consumers/Jason/keyauth/ \
  --data 'key=ENTER_KEY_HERE'
```

Permalink3. Verify that your Consumer credentials are valid

We can now issue the following request to verify that the credentials of our `Jason` Consumer is valid:

```bash
$ curl -i -X GET \
  --url http://localhost:8000 \
  --header "Host: mockbin.com" \
  --header "apikey: ENTER_KEY_HERE"
```

PermalinkNext Steps

Now that we’ve covered the basics of creating consumers, enabling plugins, and adding apis you can start giving out access and sharing your API.