OpenAPI/Swagger Generation

Last update: Oct 25, 2022

The OpenAPI or Swagger documentation is automatically generated by the KrakenD Enterprise binary when you use the krakend generate openapi command (see Exporting to OpenAPI).

OpenAPI configuration

The OpenAPI documentation configuration has two different placements that you can use:

• service level: Defines the general business information and metadata that provides context about your company and how to get in touch with you as an end-user, it is common to all endpoints.
• endpoint level: Defines the documentation and metadata for a specific endpoint.

Both configuration placements are optional, and when you don’t provide the information, KrakenD sets defaults.

Setting the API information

At the service level (the root of the configuration file), you can declare an extra_config with the documentation/openapi to declare the general API information for your developers. All the fields are optional.

The available fields are self-explanatory by seeing the following example:

{
  "version": 3,
  "name": "Your KrakenD API",
  "extra_config": {
    "documentation/openapi": {
        "description": "This is a sample server. You can find out more about at [http://blah](http://blah.blah.com)",
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "host": "my.api.com",
        "base_path": "/v1",
        "terms_of_service": "http://url.to/tos",
        "contact_name": "The wonderful API department",
        "contact_email": "[email protected]",
        "contact_url": "https://your.company/developers",
        "license_name": "MIT",
        "license_url": "https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT",
        "tags": ["B2B", "Restricted"],
        "schemes": [
          "http",
          "https"
        ]
    }
  }
}

The name specified in the root of the configuration (outside the OpenAPI’s extra_config) is used as the title of your API. If none is present, the string KrakenD - API Gateway is the default.

Documenting endpoints

In addition to setting global metadata for the whole API, you can insert additional information to each endpoint, so users can have an explanation of what every endpoint does. All fields are optional:

{
     "endpoint": "/foo",
     "extra_config": {
        "documentation/openapi": {
            "description": "Very long description of what this endpoint does",
            "summary": "Get my favourite foo",
            "tags": ["foo", "bar", "baz"],
            "audience": ["gold","silver","bronze"],
            "example": {
              "user_id": 33
            }
        }
      }
}

Integration with JSON Schema

When your endpoint uses a validation/json-schema, all write methods (POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) add in the documentation automatically its validation conditions.

Define different audiences of your OpenAPI

When you declare your endpoints, you might want to restrict some of them from appearing in the final documentation export because the audience consuming them doesn’t need to be aware of their existence.

For instance, let’s say your API exposes endpoints like /user, /cart, or /admin, where the administration endpoint is for internal usage. Why would you document it for your end-users if they are not supposed to use it or know its existence?

For cases like this, you might want to add definitions of specific audiences to the endpoints. For instance:

[
  {
    "endpoint": "/user",
    "extra_config": {
      "documentation/openapi": {
        "description": "The user endppoint",
        "audience": [
          "public",
          "internal"
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "endpoint": "/cart",
    "extra_config": {
      "documentation/openapi": {
        "description": "The cart endpoint",
        "audience": [
          "public",
          "internal"
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "endpoint": "/admin",
    "extra_config": {
      "documentation/openapi": {
        "description": "The admin endpoint",
        "audience": [
          "internal"
        ]
      }
    }
  }
]

Then, when generating the documentation, you can filter out the /admin endpoint and exclude it from the final documentation with krakend generate openapi -c krakend.json -a public.

Similarly, using krakend generate openapi -c krakend.json -a internal would generate the documentation for the three endpoints, but not specifying the -a flag would have produced the same effect.

Notice that the audience attribute lets you exclude endpoints from the final documentation, but they exist anyway, and you must protect them against unwanted usage.