Consumer

Description

In APISIX, a Consumer represents a user, application, or host that sends requests through the gateway. Consumers are typically used with authentication plugins, which identify a Consumer from request credentials and make its plugin configuration available while APISIX processes the request.

consumer-who

Consumers can carry plugin configuration and can reference a Consumer Group for shared plugin configuration. When the same plugin is configured in more than one local object, APISIX merges those configurations according to the plugin merging precedence.

Configuration options

The fields for defining a Consumer are defined as below.

Field	Required	Description
`username`	True	Unique name of the Consumer.
`desc`	False	Description of the Consumer.
`labels`	False	Labels attached to the Consumer.
`group_id`	False	ID of the Consumer Group whose plugins are merged with the Consumer’s plugins.
`plugins`	False	Plugin configuration for the Consumer. See Plugins.

Identifying a Consumer

The process of identifying a Consumer in APISIX works as follows:

An authentication plugin, such as key-auth or jwt-auth, validates the request credentials.
The plugin identifies the Consumer by its unique username.
APISIX merges the Consumer and Consumer Group plugin configuration with the plugin configuration from the matched Route, Plugin Config, and Service.

Consumers are useful when different applications or users request the same API and require different plugin configuration, such as rate limits or access controls. A Consumer does not hold an Upstream configuration.

Authentication plugins enabled in APISIX can be configured on a Consumer. Examples include basic-auth, hmac-auth, jwt-auth, key-auth, ldap-auth, and wolf-rbac.

Refer to the documentation for the key-auth authentication Plugin to further understand the concept of a Consumer.

NOTE

For more information about the Consumer object, you can refer to the Admin API Consumer object resource introduction.

Example

The example below shows how you can enable a Plugin for a specific Consumer.

NOTE

You can fetch the admin_key from config.yaml and save to an environment variable with the following command:

admin_key=$(yq '.deployment.admin.admin_key[0].key' conf/config.yaml | sed 's/"//g')

Create a Consumer, specify the authentication plugin key-auth, and enable the specific plugin limit-count.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/consumers \
-H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "username": "jack",
    "plugins": {
        "key-auth": {
            "key": "auth-one"
        },
        "limit-count": {
            "count": 2,
            "time_window": 60,
            "rejected_code": 503,
            "key": "remote_addr"
        }
    }
}'

Create a Router, set routing rules and enable plugin configuration.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes/1 \
-H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "plugins": {
        "key-auth": {}
    },
    "upstream": {
        "nodes": {
            "127.0.0.1:1980": 1
        },
        "type": "roundrobin"
    },
    "uri": "/hello"
}'

Send a test request, the first two return to normal, did not reach the speed limit threshold.
```
curl http://127.0.0.1:9080/hello -H 'apikey: auth-one' -I
```
The third test returns 503 and the request is restricted.
```
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
...
```

We can use the consumer-restriction Plugin to restrict our user “Jack” from accessing the API.

Add Jack to the blacklist.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes/1 \
-H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "plugins": {
        "key-auth": {},
        "consumer-restriction": {
            "blacklist": [
                "jack"
            ]
        }
    },
    "upstream": {
        "nodes": {
            "127.0.0.1:1980": 1
        },
        "type": "roundrobin"
    },
    "uri": "/hello"
}'

Repeated tests, all return 403; Jack is forbidden to access this API.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9080/hello -H 'apikey: auth-one' -I

HTTP/1.1 403
...

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