Kong ➕ Vagrant
Vagrant is used to create an isolated environment for Kong including PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Redis.
You can use the vagrant box either as an all-in-one Kong installation for testing purposes, or you can link it up with source code and start developing on Kong or on custom plugins.
Table of contents
- Try Kong
- Development environment
- Environment variables and configuration
- Known issues
- Enterprise support
WINDOWS USERS: Please check the known issues
IMPORTANT: The Kong admin api is by default only available on localhost, but to be able to access it from the host system, the Vagrant box will listen on all interfaces by default. This might be a security risk in your environment.
Try Kong
If you just want to give Kong a test ride, and you have Vagrant installed, then you can simply clone this vagrant repo, and build the VM.
# clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-vagrant
$ cd kong-vagrant
# build the machine
$ vagrant up
# start Kong, by ssh into the vm
$ vagrant ssh
$ kong start --run-migrations
# alternatively use ssh -c option to start Kong
$ vagrant ssh -c "kong start --run-migrations"
Kong is now started and is available on the exposed ports.
To verify Kong is running successfully, execute the following command (from the host machine):
$ curl http://localhost:8001
You should receive a JSON response:
{
"tagline": "Welcome to Kong",
"version": "x.x.x",
"hostname": "precise64",
"lua_version": "LuaJIT 2.1.0-alpha",
"plugins": {
"enabled_in_cluster": {},
"available_on_server": [
...
]
}
}
See the environment variables section below for defaults used and how to modify the settings of the Vagrant machine.
When done you can destroy the virtual machine again:
# delete the virtual machine
$ vagrant destroy
Development environment
Preparing the development environment
Once you have Vagrant installed, follow these steps to set up a development
environment for both Kong itself as well as for custom plugins. It will
install the development dependencies like the busted
test framework.
# clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-vagrant
$ cd kong-vagrant
# clone the Kong repo (inside the vagrant one)
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong
# only if you want to develop a custom plugin, also clone the plugin template
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-plugin
# build a box with a folder synced to your local Kong and plugin sources
$ vagrant up
# ssh into the Vagrant machine, and setup the dev environment
$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /kong
$ make dev
# only if you want to run the custom plugin, tell Kong to load it
$ export KONG_CUSTOM_PLUGINS=myplugin
# startup kong: while inside '/kong' call `kong` from the repo as `bin/kong`!
# we will also need to ensure that migrations are up to date
$ cd /kong
$ bin/kong migrations up
$ bin/kong start
This will tell Vagrant to mount your local Kong repository under the guest's
/kong
folder, and (if you cloned it) the 'kong-plugin' repository under the
guest's /kong-plugin
folder.
To verify Kong has loaded the plugin successfully, execute the following command from the host machine:
$ curl http://localhost:8001
In the response you get, the plugins list should now contain an entry "myplugin" to indicate the plugin was loaded.
To start using the plugin, execute from the host:
# create an api that simply echoes the request using mockbin, using a
# 'catch-all' setup with the `uris` field set to '/'
# NOTE: for pre-0.10 versions 'uris=' below should be 'request_path='
$ curl -i -X POST \
--url http://localhost:8001/apis/ \
--data 'name=mockbin' \
--data 'upstream_url=http://mockbin.org/request' \
--data 'uris=/'
# add the custom plugin, to our new api
$ curl -i -X POST \
--url http://localhost:8001/apis/mockbin/plugins/ \
--data 'name=myplugin'
Check whether it is working by making a request from the host:
$ curl -i http://localhost:8000
The response you get should be an echo (by Mockbin) of the request. But in the
response headers the plugin has now inserted a header Bye-World
.
Running Kong from the source repo
Because the start and stop scripts are in the repository, you must use those to stop and start Kong. Using the scripts that came with the base version you specified when building the Vagrant box will lead to unpredictable results.
# ssh into the Vagrant machine
$ vagrant ssh
# only if you want to run the custom plugin, tell Kong to load it
$ export KONG_CUSTOM_PLUGINS=myplugin
# startup kong: while inside '/kong' call `kong` from the repo as `bin/kong`!
# we will also need to ensure that migrations are up to date
$ cd /kong
$ bin/kong migrations up
$ bin/kong start
Testing Kong and custom plugins
To use the test helpers from the Kong repo, you must first setup the development environment as mentioned above.
To run test suites, you should first stop Kong, and clear any environment variables you've set to prevent them from interfering with the tests.
The test environment has the same limitation as running from source in that it
must be executed from the Kong source repo at /kong
, inside the Vagrant
machine.
# ssh into the Vagrant machine
$ vagrant ssh
# enter the repo and start the linter
$ cd /kong
$ make lint
# testing: while inside '/kong' call `busted` from the repo as `bin/busted`!
$ bin/busted
# or for more verbose output do
$ bin/busted -v -o gtest
Note that Kong comes with a special Busted script that runs against the OpenResty environment, instead of regular Busted which runs against Lua(JIT) directly.
To test the plugin specific tests:
# ssh into the Vagrant machine
$ vagrant ssh
# start the linter from the plugin repository
$ cd /kong-plugin
$ luacheck .
# testing: while inside '/kong' call `busted` from the repo as `bin/busted`,
# but specify the plugin testsuite to be executed
$ cd /kong
$ bin/busted /kong-plugin/spec
Log files
To log stuff for debugging during your tests, you need to realize that there are generally 2 processes running when testing:
- Test files executed by
busted
that run your tests - The Kong instance that your tests are running against.
So to debug you can simply use the print
function. In the former case the
output will be in your terminal from where you executed the tests. In the
latter case the output will be in the error.log
file, but this file is
cleaned automatically in between tests.
Because the Kong tests run in the servroot
prefix inside the Kong repo
you can track them using a tail
command.
Inside the virtual machine, the Kong prefix (working directory) will be set to
/kong/servroot
. You can track the log files (from the host) like this for example:
vagrant ssh -c "tail -F /kong/servroot/logs/error.log"
If you have the Kong source tree available, then /kong
will be mounted
from the host and the prefix will be on the host in <kong-repo>/servroot
(the
same location where the tests will also run).
In this case you can track the log files directly on the host like this for example:
tail -F <kong-repo>/servroot/logs/error.log"
Development tips and tricks
-
Add
export KONG_LOG_LEVEL=debug
to your bash profile on the host so it will be automatically set whenever you rebuild the VM (applies to other environment variables as well) -
To run individual tests use the
--tags
switch in busted. Define a test with a tag;it("will test something #only", function() -- test here end
Then execute the test with
bin/busted --tags=only
-
Some snippets for debug statements on Kong nation.
-
The VM will have some additional helpful utilities installed:
Utilities and profiling
Vagrant can build the box with a set of additional utilities if requested:
- Profiling tools (see tools pages for usage details):
To enable those tools use KONG_UTILITIES=true
when building the VM.
Environment variables and configuration
The following environment variables will be copied from the Host system into the virtual machine upon provisioning:
name | description |
---|---|
KONG_LOG_LEVEL |
setting the KONG_LOG_LEVEL variable in the virtual machine |
HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY |
Proxy settings to be able to properly build the machine when using a proxy |
You can alter the behavior of the provision step by setting the following environment variables:
name | description | default |
---|---|---|
KONG_VERSION |
the Kong version number to download and install at the provision step | 0.14.1 |
KONG_VB_MEM |
virtual machine memory (RAM) size (in MB) | 4096 |
KONG_CASSANDRA |
the major Cassandra version to use, either 2 or 3 |
3 , or 2 for Kong versions 9.x and older |
KONG_PATH |
the path to mount your local Kong source under the guest's /kong folder |
./kong , ../kong , or nothing. In this order. |
KONG_PLUGIN_PATH |
the path to mount your local plugin source under the guest's /kong-plugin folder |
./kong-plugin , ../kong-plugin , or nothing. In this order. |
KONG_UTILITIES |
boolean determining whether or not to add the additional utilities | undefined |
KONG_NGINX_WORKER_PROCESSES |
the number of CPUs available to the virtual machine (relates to the number of nginx workers) | 2 |
Use them when provisioning, e.g.:
$ KONG_VERSION=0.12.1 vagrant up
The xxx_PATH
variables will take the value set, or the defaults, but the
defaults will only be taken if they actually exist. As such the defaults allow
for 2 file structures, without any configuration.
Structure where everything resides inside the kong-vagrant
repo:
-some_dir
|-kong-vagrant
|-kong
|-kong-plugin
or if you prefer all repos on the same level:
-some_dir
|-kong-vagrant
|-kong
|-kong-plugin
Exposed ports
The (non-configurable) exposed ports are;
8000
Proxy port8443
SSL Proxy port8001
Admin API8444
SSL Admin API65432
Postgres datastore
These are mapped 1-on-1 between the host and guest.
Known issues
Postgres connection refused
When you get an error that postgres refused the connection, eg.
Error: [postgres error] could not retrieve server_version: connection refused
Then make sure that Postgres was properly started, check it like this:
# ssh into the vm
$ vagrant ssh
$ service --status-all
If it wasn't started, you can do so by executing:
# ssh into the vm
$ vagrant ssh
$ sudo service postgresql start
Windows
When using the Vagrant box on Windows, in combination with the source repositories, then you might run into issues due to text file incompatibilities. Windows line endings are not supported in unix shell scripts. This problem does not apply to Lua files, since Lua is agnostic to the different line end markers.
Most notably there are 2 files that cause problems (but there might be more):
/kong/bin/busted
command line script for testing/kong/bin/kong
command line script for starting/stopping Kong
The reason they have Windows line endings is because they are mounted from the
host system. And the Windows git
client most likely converted them to Windows
format when checking out the repository.
Workaround:
# ssh into the vm
$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /kong
# checkout the files using the unix git client which will check them out again
# (but without doing the CrLf conversion that the Windows client does).
$ git checkout -- bin/busted bin/kong
Now you can use the bin/kong
and bin/busted
commands as usual.
Incompatible versions error
When Kong starts it can give errors for incompatible versions. This happens for example when dependencies have been updated. Eg. 0.9.2 required Openresty 1.9.15.1, whilst 0.9.5 requires 1.11.2.1.
So please reprovision it and specify the proper version you want to work with (either newer or older, see the defaults above), as in the example below with version 0.9.2;
# clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-vagrant
$ cd kong-vagrant/
# clone the Kong repo and switch explicitly to the 0.9.2 version.
# this will get the proper Kong source code for the version.
$ git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong
$ cd kong
$ git checkout 0.9.2
$ cd ..
# start a box with a folder synced to your local Kong clone, and
# specifically targetting 0.9.2, to get the required binary versions
$ KONG_VERSION=0.9.2 vagrant up
worker_connections are not enough error
When running tests these errors occasionally happen. The underlying reason seems to be that in the VM the connections are not freed up quickly enough. There seem to be 2 workarounds;
- add more memory to the VM. Recreate the vm with:
KONG_VB_MEM=4096 vagrant up
- run the tests by explicitly raising the connection limit, by prefixing the
resty
executable and the new limit-c 65000
, for example:
resty -c 65000 bin/busted -v -o gtest
Vagrant error; The box 'hashicorp/precise64' could not be found
There is a known issue with Vagrant on OS X with an included curl
version
that fails. See stack overflow
for a solution.
Enterprise Support
Support, Demo, Training, API Certifications and Consulting available at https://getkong.org/enterprise.