Guides

A guide does one job: it names the role you need, walks the console step by step, and ends with a request you send and the answer to expect. The groups below are in the order an API usually grows. Inside a group, the pages are in the order to read them; the first guide of each group builds on Your first API.

Read in this order

1. Expose an API. Put a backend behind a route, share it between routes, and stand in for it while it is built.
2. Protect an API. Decide who may call a route: keys, tokens, passwords, named clients, teams, networks, browsers and your identity provider.
3. Control traffic. Limits per route, per client and per group, plugins on every request, a share to a new version, a breaker and a cache.
4. Shape requests and answers. Change what the backend sees and what the client gets: the path, the headers and the client address.
5. Serve HTTPS. Serve HTTPS under your own host name and send HTTP clients to it.
6. Record traffic. Send a copy of every request record to a store of your own.
7. Use a language model. Put a language model behind a route, with the key on the gateway, a token budget, a prompt guard and a cache.