Endpoint Configuration

Document updated on Mar 13, 2023

KrakenD endpoints are the most critical configuration part of KrakenD, as they are what your end users consume. Adding endpoint objects creates the API contract your users will consume.

The endpoints array contains the API definition you are publishing. It is a collection of endpoint objects, and you have to place it at the root of your configuration file.

The endpoint object

To create an endpoint, you only need to add an endpoint object under the endpoints collection. An endpoint object should contain at least the endpoint name and a backend section (to where it connects to). The defaults are taken if no further information is declared (e.g., method will be a GET, and output_encoding as json).

An endpoints section might look like this:

{
  "endpoints": [
    {
      "endpoint": "/v1/users/{user}",
      "method": "GET",
      "backend": [
        {
          "url_pattern": "/users/summary/{user}",
          "method": "GET",
          "host": [
            "https://api.mybackend.com"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The previous example exposes a GET /v1/users/{user} endpoint to the clients and takes the data from your existing backend GET https://api.mybackend.com/users/summary/{user}.

Inside this object, you can add manipulation options and transform the response before it returns to the end user.

Endpoint object configuration

The configuration attributes of endpoints objects are:

Endpoints with multiple nesting levels

You might have envisioned KrakenD as a proxy and expected its endpoint declaration to work as a prefix and listen to any path with an undetermined number of nesting levels. But KrakenD does not work like this by default. Instead, it expects you to declare every possible URL structure.

For instance, you declared an "endpoint": "/user/{id}" and you expected to resolve URLs like /user/john/profile/preferences, but you are getting a 404 instead. There are two solutions to this problem:

1. You can declare all possible endpoints: /user/{id}, /user/{id}/{level2}, /user/{id}/{level2}/{level3}, etc.
2. You use a Wildcard Enterprise

Endpoints listening to multiple methods

The method attribute defines the HTTP verb you can use with the endpoint. If you need to support multiple methods (e.g., GET, POST, DELETE) in the same endpoint, you must declare one endpoint object for each method. So if you want the same endpoint to listen to GET and POST requests, you need the following configuration:

{
  "endpoints": [
    {
      "endpoint": "/v1/users/{user}",
      "method": "GET",
      "backend": [
        {
          "url_pattern": "/users/summary/{user}",
          "method": "GET",
          "host": [
            "https://api.mybackend.com"
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "endpoint": "/v1/users/{user}",
      "method": "POST",
      "backend": [
        {
          "url_pattern": "/users/summary/{user}",
          "method": "POST",
          "host": [
            "https://api.mybackend.com"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }

  ]
}

Endpoint variables

As you can see in the examples above, endpoints can define variables in their endpoint definition. To do so, encapsulate the variable name with curly braces, like {var}.

{
  "endpoint": "/user/{id}"
}

The previous endpoint will accept requests like /user/123 or /user/A-B-C. But it won’t take a request like /user/1/2, as there is an extra slash than the definition, and KrakenD considers this to be a different endpoint.

Automatic protocol and encoding translation

The endpoints return HTTP content to the end-user in any of the supported encodings, regardless of the type of backend you are connecting to.

If, for instance, one of the backends you are connecting to uses AMQP, Kafka, gRPC, or any other supported services, KrakenD will perform automatically for you both the protocol and the encoding translation.