Permalink5-minute Quickstart

PermalinkIntroduction

Before you start: Make sure you've installed Kong — It should only take a minute!

In this section, you’ll learn how to manage your Kong instance. First we’ll have you start Kong in order to give you access to the RESTful Admin interface to manage your APIs, consumers, and more. Data sent through the Admin API is stored in Kong’s datastore (as of 0.8.0, Kong supports PostgreSQL and Cassandra).

Note: make sure you have your database instance running and configured in Kong.

Permalink1. Start Kong.

Issue the following command to [start][CLI] Kong:

```bash
$ kong start
```

**Note:** The CLI also accepts a configuration (`-c <path_to_config>`) option allowing you to point to different configurations.

Permalink2. Verify that Kong has started successfully

The previous step runs migrations to prepare your database.
Once these have finished you should see a message (`Kong started`) informing you that Kong is running.

By default Kong listens on the following ports:

`:8000` - Proxy layer for API requests

`:8001` - [RESTful Admin API][API] for configuration

Permalink3. Stop Kong.

As needed you can stop the Kong process by issuing the following [command][CLI]:

```bash
$ kong stop
```

Permalink4. Reload Kong.

Issue the following command to [reload][CLI] Kong without downtime:

```bash
$ kong reload
```

PermalinkNext Steps

Now that you have Kong running you can interact with the Admin API.

To begin, go to Adding your API ›