Serving a website and API with Kong Gateway

How to serve both a website and APIs using Kong Gateway

A common use case for API providers is to make Kong Gateway serve both a website and the APIs over port: 80 or 443 in production. For example, https://example.net (Website) and https://example.net/api/v1 (API).

You can do this using a custom Nginx configuration template that calls nginx_kong.lua in-line, and adds a new location block that serves website alongside the Kong proxy location block:

  1. # ---------------------
  2. # custom_nginx.template
  3. # ---------------------
  5. worker_processes ${{NGINX_WORKER_PROCESSES}}; # can be set by kong.conf
  6. daemon ${{NGINX_DAEMON}};                     # can be set by kong.conf
  8. pid pids/nginx.pid;                      # this setting is mandatory
  9. error_log logs/error.log ${{LOG_LEVEL}}; # can be set by kong.conf
  10. events {}
  12. http {
  13.   # here, we inline the contents of nginx_kong.lua
  14.   charset UTF-8;
  16.   # any contents until Kong's Proxy server block
  17.   ...
  19.   # Kong's Proxy server block
  20.   server {
  21.     server_name kong;
  23.     # any contents until the location / block
  24.     ...
  26.     # here, we declare our custom location serving our website
  27.     # (or API portal) which we can optimize for serving static assets
  28.     location / {
  29.       root /var/www/example.net;
  30.       index index.htm index.html;
  31.       ...
  32.     }
  34.     # Kong's Proxy location / has been changed to /api/v1
  35.     location /api/v1 {
  36.       set $upstream_host nil;
  37.       set $upstream_scheme nil;
  38.       set $upstream_uri nil;
  40.       # Any remaining configuration for the Proxy location
  41.       ...
  42.     }
  43.   }
  45.   # Kong's Admin server block goes below
  46.   # ...
  47. }

Then start Nginx:

nginx -p /usr/local/openresty -c my_nginx.conf

More Information