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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:

# ---------------------
# custom_nginx.template
# ---------------------
worker_processes ${{NGINX_WORKER_PROCESSES}}; # can be set by kong.conf
daemon ${{NGINX_DAEMON}};                     # can be set by kong.conf
pid pids/nginx.pid;                      # this setting is mandatory
error_log logs/error.log ${{LOG_LEVEL}}; # can be set by kong.conf
events {}
http {
  # here, we inline the contents of nginx_kong.lua
  charset UTF-8;
  # any contents until Kong's Proxy server block
  ...
  # Kong's Proxy server block
  server {
    server_name kong;
    # any contents until the location / block
    ...
    # here, we declare our custom location serving our website
    # (or API portal) which we can optimize for serving static assets
    location / {
      root /var/www/example.net;
      index index.htm index.html;
      ...
    }
    # Kong's Proxy location / has been changed to /api/v1
    location /api/v1 {
      set $upstream_host nil;
      set $upstream_scheme nil;
      set $upstream_uri nil;
      # Any remaining configuration for the Proxy location
      ...
    }
  }
  # Kong's Admin server block goes below
  # ...
}

Then start Nginx:

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

More Information

• Setting environment variables
• How to use kong.conf