Enable Basic Auth in the Dev Portal

The Kong Dev Portal can be fully or partially authenticated using HTTP protocol’s Basic Authentication scheme. Requests are sent with an Authorization header that contains the word Basic followed by the base64-encoded username:password string.

Basic Authentication for the Dev Portal can be enabled using any of the following ways:

Warnings:

  • Enabling authentication in the Dev Portal requires use of the Sessions plugin. Developers will not be able to log in if this is not properly set. For more information, see Sessions in the Dev Portal.

  • When Dev Portal Authentication is enabled, content files remain unauthenticated until a role is applied to them. The exceptions are settings.txt and dashboard.txt, which begin with the * role. For more information, see Developer Roles and Content Permissions.

Enable Portal Session Config

In the Kong configuration file, set the portal_session_conf property:

  1. portal_session_conf={ "cookie_name":"portal_session","secret":"<CHANGE_THIS>","storage":"kong"}

If using HTTP while testing, include "cookie_secure": false in the config:

  1. portal_session_conf={ "cookie_name":"portal_session","secret":"<CHANGE_THIS>","storage":"kong","cookie_secure":false}

Or, if you have different subdomains for the portal_api_url and portal_gui_host, set the cookie_domain and cookie_samesite properties as follows:

  1. portal_session_conf={ "cookie_name":"portal_session","secret":"<CHANGE_THIS>","storage":"kong","cookie_secure":false,"cookie_domain":"<.your_subdomain.com>","cookie_samesite":"off"  }

See Also

  • For more information about portal session configuration, see Sessions.

  • For more information about domains and cookies in Dev Portal sessions, see Domains.

Enable Basic Auth Using Kong Manager

  1. Navigate to the Dev Portal’s Settings page.
  2. Find Authentication plugin under the Authentication tab.
  3. Select Basic Authentication.
  4. Click Save Changes.

Authentication plugin

Enable Basic Auth Using the Command Line

To patch a Dev Portal’s authentication property directly, run:

  1. $ curl -X PATCH http://localhost:8001/workspaces/<WORKSPACE_NAME> \
  2.   --data "config.portal_auth=basic-auth"

Enable Basic Auth Using kong.conf

Kong allows for a default authentication plugin to be set in the Kong configuration file with the portal_auth property.

In your kong.conf file, set the property as follows:

  1. portal_auth="basic-auth"

This sets all Dev Portals to use Basic Authentication by default when initialized.