Version: 2.13

Getting Started

Summary#

This guide walks through how you can get up and running with Apache APISIX.

The guide is divided into these three steps:

Installing Apache APISIX
Creating a Route and binding it with an Upstream
Verifying the results after binding with curl

This document also introduces some of the advanced features and operations in Apache APISIX like authentication, prefixing a Route, using the APISIX Dashboard, and troubleshooting.

The following echo endpoint is used as an example here. This endpoint will return the parameters we pass.

Request

The components of the request URL are shown and explained below:

Protocol: The network transport protocol. HTTP protocol is used for this example.
Port: The port. 80 is used for this example.
Host: The host. httpbin.org is used for this example.
Path: The path. /get is used for this example.
Query Parameters: The query string. Two strings foo1 and foo2 are used for this example.

We can use the curl command to send the request:

curl --location --request GET "http://httpbin.org/get?foo1=bar1&foo2=bar2"

Response

We receive a JSON response when we send the request:

{
  "args": {
    "foo1": "bar1",
    "foo2": "bar2"
  },
  "headers": {
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "Host": "httpbin.org",
    "User-Agent": "curl/7.29.0",
    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-6088fe84-24f39487166cce1f0e41efc9"
  },
  "origin": "58.152.81.42",
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/get?foo1=bar1&foo2=bar2"
}

Pre-Requisites#

Before you jump ahead, make sure that you have your machine setup with these tools.

Docker and Docker Compose.
curl for testing the API. Alternatively, you can use tools like Hoppscotch or Postman.

Note

If you already have Apache APISIX installed, please skip Step 1, and go to Step 2 directly.

Step 1: Install Apache APISIX#

You can check out Building Apache APISIX for different installation methods.

To get started quickly, we will install Apache APISIX with Docker and enable the Admin API.

# Download the docker-compose file of Apache APISIX
git clone https://github.com/apache/apisix-docker.git
# Switch the current directory to the apisix-docker/example
cd apisix-docker/example
# Start Apache APISIX with docker-compose
docker-compose -p docker-apisix up -d

Apache APISIX already supports ARM64 architecture. To run Apache APISIX on ARM64, run: docker-compose -p docker-apisix -f docker-compose-arm64.yml up -d instead of the last step above.

Please remain patient as it will take some time to download the files and spin up the containers.

Once Apache APISIX is running, you can use curl to access the Admin API. You can also check if Apache APISIX is running properly by running this command and checking the response.

# Execute on your host machine (machine running Docker)
curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/services/" -H 'X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1'

This response indicates that Apache APISIX is running successfully.

{
  "count":0,
  "action":"get",
  "node":{
    "key":"/apisix/services",
    "nodes":[],
    "dir":true
  }
}

Step 2: Create a Route#

Routes matches the client's requests based on defined rules, loads and executes the corresponding plugins, and forwards the request to the specified upstream.

From the previous step, we have a running instance of Apache APISIX in Docker. Now let's create a Route.

Apache APISIX provides a powerful Admin API and APISIX Dashboard. Here, we will use the Admin API to create a Route and connect it to an Upstream service. When a request arrives, Apache APISIX will forward the request to the specified Upstream service.

We will create a sample configuration for our Route object so that Apache APISIX can forward the request to the corresponding Upstream service.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/routes/1" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "methods": ["GET"],
  "host": "example.com",
  "uri": "/anything/*",
  "upstream": {
    "type": "roundrobin",
    "nodes": {
      "httpbin.org:80": 1
    }
  }
}'

This configuration means that it will forward all matching inbound requests to the upstream service (httpbin.org:80) if they meet these specified criterion.

The HTTP method of the request is GET.
The request header contains the host field, and its value is example.com.
The request path matches /anything/*. * means any sub path. For example /anything/foo?arg=10.

Now that the Route has been created, we can access the Upstream service from the address exposed by Apache APISIX.

curl -i -X GET "http://127.0.0.1:9080/anything/foo?arg=10" -H "Host: example.com"

This request will be forwarded to http://httpbin.org:80/anything/foo?arg=10 by Apache APISIX.

Create an Upstream#

In the previous session we discussed setting up a Route and an Upstream for the Route.

To create an Upstream, we can execute the following command.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/upstreams/1" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "type": "roundrobin",
  "nodes": {
    "httpbin.org:80": 1
  }
}'

We use roundrobin as the load balancing mechanism and set httpbin.org:80 as our Upstream service with an ID of 1. See Admin API for more information about the fields.

Note

Creating an Upstream service is not mandatory as we can use a Plugin to intercept the request and then respond directly. However, for the purposes of this guide, we assume that at least one Upstream service needs to be set up.

Binding the Route to the Upstream#

We can now bind a Route to the Upstream service we just created.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/routes/1" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "uri": "/get",
  "host": "httpbin.org",
  "upstream_id": "1"
}'

Step 3: Validating the Route#

We will now access Apache APISIX to test the Route and the bounded Upstream service.

curl -i -X GET "http://127.0.0.1:9080/get?foo1=bar1&foo2=bar2" -H "Host: httpbin.org"

This will return the data from the Upstream service we configured in our route (httpbin.org).

Advanced Features and Operations#

This section looks at some of the advanced features and operations available in Apache APISIX like authentication, prefixing a Route, using the APISIX Dashboard, and troubleshooting.

Authentication#

The Route we created in step 2 is public. This means that anyone knowing the address exposed by Apache APISIX can access the Upstream service.

This is unsafe and amounts to security risks. So, in practical applications, we generally add authentication to the Route to enhance security.

Let's assume for our scenario that we only want a specific user John to have access to the Upstream service.

We will use Consumer a Plugin to implement authentication to handle this scenario.

First, we will use the key-auth plugin to create a Consumer John. We also need to provide the specified key for John.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/consumers" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "username": "john",
  "plugins": {
    "key-auth": {
      "key": "key-of-john"
    }
  }
}'

We can now bind consumer(John) to the Route. For this, we just need to enable the key-auth plugin as shown below.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/routes/1" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "uri": "/get",
  "host": "httpbin.org",
  "plugins": {
    "key-auth": {}
  },
  "upstream_id": "1"
}'

Now with the authentication added, when we try to access the Route we created in step 2 it will trigger an "Unauthorized Error".

To access the Route, we need to add a Header named apikey with John's key.

curl -i -X GET http://127.0.0.1:9080/get -H "Host: httpbin.org" -H "apikey: key-of-john"

Prefixing a Route#

When you want to add a prefix to your Route but don't want to use the Host header, you can use the proxy-rewrite Plugin.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/admin/routes/1" -H "X-API-KEY: edd1c9f034335f136f87ad84b625c8f1" -X PUT -d '
{
  "uri": "/samplePrefix/get",
  "plugins": {
    "proxy-rewrite": {
      "regex_uri": ["^/samplePrefix/get(.*)", "/get$1"]
    },
    "key-auth": {}
  },
  "upstream_id": "1"
}'

Then to invoke the Route you can run:

curl -i -X GET "http://127.0.0.1:9080/samplePrefix/get?param1=foo&param2=bar" -H "apikey: key-of-john"

APISIX Dashboard#

Apache APISIX comes with an intuitive Dashboard to make it easy to configure and perform operations.

Troubleshooting#

You can try these troubleshooting steps if you are unable to proceed as suggested in the docs above.

Please open an issue if you run into any bugs or if there are any missing troubleshooting steps.

Make sure that all required ports (default 9080/9443/2379) are available (not used by other systems or processes).
You can run the command below to terminate the processes that are listening on a specific port (on Unix-based systems).
```
sudo fuser -k 9443/tcp
```
If the Docker container keeps restarting or IS failing, log in to the container and observe the logs to diagnose the problem.
```
docker logs -f --tail container_id
```