Start Kong Gateway Securely

The Super Admin has the ability to invite other Admins and restrict their access based on Permissions of Roles within Workspaces.

The first Super Admin account is created during database migrations following the guide below. It may only be added once.

After , either modify the configuration file or set environment variables for the following properties:

For a simple configuration to use for the subsequent Getting Started guides:

⚠️Important: the Sessions Plugin requries a secret and is configured securely by default.

• Under all circumstances, the must be manually set to a string.
• If using different domains for the Admin API and Kong Manager, cookie_samesite must be set to off. Learn more about these properties in Session Security in Kong Manager, and see .

Set a password for the Super Admin. This environment variable must be present in the environment where database migrations will run.

This automatically creates a user, , and a password that can be used to log in to Kong Manager. This password may also be used as a Kong-Admin-Token to make Admin API requests.

Future migrations will not update the password or create additional Super Admins. To add additional Super Admins it is necessary to invite a new user as a Super Admin in Kong Manager.

Issue the following command to prepare your datastore by running the Kong migrations:

Start Kong:

Note: the CLI accepts a configuration option (-c /path/to/kong.conf) allowing you to point to .

The username is kong_admin and the password is the one set in Step 1.