Chainguard Container for kong

Kong is a Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kong:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard’s Kong image is a lean, Wolfi-based container image. It mirrors the Docker image from the Kong project in functionality but has fewer dependencies, minimizing the attack surface.

Getting Started

The following is an simple example of running the Chainguard Kong image in DB-less mode using Docker:

docker run -d --name kong \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  -p 8443:8443 \
  -e KONG_DATABASE=off \
  -e KONG_DECLARATIVE_CONFIG=/etc/kong/kong.yml \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kong:latest

Once the container is running, you can test Kong’s gateway functionality by sending requests to http://localhost:8000.

Using Kong With a Database

If you prefer to run Kong using a database (PostgreSQL or Cassandra), you can do so by setting the appropriate environment variables.

First, create a custom Docker network to allow the containers to discover and communicate with each other:

docker network create kong-net

Then start a database container. To illustrate, we will use a PostgreSQL container:

docker run -d --name kong-database \
 --network=kong-net \
 -p 5432:5432 \
 -e "POSTGRES_USER=kong" \
 -e "POSTGRES_DB=kong" \
 -e "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=kongpass" \
 postgres:13

Next, prepare the Kong database:

docker run --rm --network=kong-net \
 -e "KONG_DATABASE=postgres" \
 -e "KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database" \
 -e "KONG_PG_PASSWORD=kongpass" \
 -e "KONG_PASSWORD=test" \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kong:latest kong migrations bootstrap

Run the following command to start a container with Kong Gateway:

docker run -d --name kong-gateway \
--network=kong-net \
-e "KONG_DATABASE=postgres" \
-e "KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database" \
-e "KONG_PG_USER=kong" \
-e "KONG_PG_PASSWORD=kongpass" \
-e "KONG_PROXY_ACCESS_LOG=/dev/stdout" \
-e "KONG_ADMIN_ACCESS_LOG=/dev/stdout" \
-e "KONG_PROXY_ERROR_LOG=/dev/stderr" \
-e "KONG_ADMIN_ERROR_LOG=/dev/stderr" \
-e "KONG_ADMIN_LISTEN=0.0.0.0:8001, 0.0.0.0:8444 ssl" \
-e "KONG_ADMIN_GUI_URL=http://localhost:8002" \
-p 8000:8000 \
-p 8443:8443 \
-p 127.0.0.1:8001:8001 \
-p 127.0.0.1:8002:8002 \
-p 127.0.0.1:8444:8444 \
cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kong:latest

Documentation and Resources

Please refer to Kong’s official documentation for details on configuring your database and other advanced features.

You can explore the following resources to learn more about Kong:

• Kong Official Documentation
• Kong Developer Guide
• Kong Source Code on GitHub

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.