decK

Kong's command line tool for API Lifecycle Automation

What is decK?

decK is a command line tool that facilitates API Lifecycle Automation (APIOps) by offering a comprehensive toolkit of commands designed to orchestrate and automate the entire process of API delivery. APIOps involves leveraging automation frameworks to streamline and enforce best practices throughout the API lifecycle. This enables developers and operations teams to manage APIs from development through deployment, ensuring consistency, reliability, and speed in API integrations.

decK is one of the many tools you can use to manage Kong Gateway and Konnect. To learn about other tools, review our tools page.

When should I use decK?

You should use decK if one or more of the following is true:

You want to manage Gateway entity configuration with declarative, file-based, GitOps-style API configuration and automation
You don’t use Kubernetes or Terraform already
You’re running Kong Gateway in traditional or hybrid mode, or in Konnect

Install decK

Kong provides a Homebrew tap for decK. To install decK on macOS, run:

brew install kong/deck/deck

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If you are on Windows, you can either use the compressed archive from the Github release page or install using CMD by entering the target installation folder and downloading a compressed archive, which contains the binary.

curl -sL https://github.com/kong/deck/releases/download/v1.66.1/deck_1.66.1_windows_amd64.tar.gz -o deck.tar.gz

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```
mkdir deck
```
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```
tar -xf deck.tar.gz -C deck
```
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powershell -command "[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('Path', [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('Path', 'User') + [IO.Path]::PathSeparator + [System.IO.Directory]::GetCurrentDirectory() + '\deck', 'User')"

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Download the .deb or .rpm file from the releases page and install it using your package manager.

decK is provided as a Docker image for those that do not want to install decK locally.

To run decK using a Docker image, add the following alias to your shell:

alias deck='docker run --rm -v .:/files -w /files kong/deck'

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As decK will run in a Docker container, you’ll need to provide the --kong-addr parameter when running commands such as deck sync. To sync with a Kong Gateway that is running on the host machine, use host.docker.internal:

deck gateway sync --kong-addr http://host.docker.internal:8001 my_deck_file.yaml

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If the kong-addr you use is fixed, you can set the DECK_KONG_ADDR variable in your alias and omit it from each command:

alias deck='docker run --rm -v .:/files -w /files -e DECK_KONG_ADDR=http://host.docker.internal:8001 kong/deck'
deck gateway sync  my_deck_file.yaml

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If you use GitHub Actions to apply your declarative configuration to a running Gateway, you should use Kong/setup-deck.

This GitHub Action installs decK on to the GitHub Actions runner using the GitHub tools cache:

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: