Access an API

Tutorial: Create an API Key with the Dashboard

The Tyk Dashboard is the simplest way to generate a new Key.

We have a video walkthrough for creating an API Key.

Step 1: Select “Keys” from the “System Management” section

Keys menu

Step 2: Click CREATE

Add key

Step 3: Add a Policy or API to your Key

You have the option to add your new key to either an existing Policy or an existing individual API. For this Tutorial we are going to use an API.

Add an API to your Key

To select an API, you can either:

Scroll through your API Name list
Use the Search field
You can also Group by Authentication Type to filter your APIs
You can also Group by Category

You can leave all other options at their default settings.

Step 4: Add Configuration Details

You use the Configuration section to set the following:

Enable Detailed Logging. This is disabled by default and isn’t required for this tutorial
Give your Key an Alias. This makes your key easier
Set an Expiry time after which the key will expire. Select a value from the drop-down list. This is a required setting. See Key Expiry for more details.
Add Tags to your policy. Any tags you add can be used when filtering Analytics Data. Tags are case sensitive.
Add Metadata to your policy. Adding metadata such as User IDs can be used by middleware components. See Session Metadata for more details.

Step 4: Click CREATE

Create button

A Key successfully generated pop-up will be displayed with the key shown. You must save this somewhere for future reference as it will not be displayed again. Click Copy to clipboard and paste into a text document.

Key success message location

That’s it, you’ve created a key - now we can try and use it.

Tutorial: Create an API Key with the API

To create an API key, we will need the API ID that we wish to grant the key access to. Creating the token is then a simple API call to the endpoint.

You will also need your own API Key, to get these values:

Select Users from the System Management section.
In the users list, click Edit for your user.
The API key is the Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials, copy this somewhere you can reference it.
Select APIs from the System Management section.
From the Actions menu for your API, select Copy API ID

API ID location

Once you have these values, you can use them to access the Dashboard API, the below curl command will generate a key for one of your APIs:

Note:

Replace the authorization header value with your Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials
Replace the API ID (ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2) with your API ID
It’s recommended to validate the JSON using JSON validator to avoid any malformed input error

curl -X POST -H "authorization: 1238b7e0e2ff4c2957321724409ee2eb" \
  -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{
    "allowance": 1000,
    "rate": 1000,
    "per": 1,
    "expires": -1,
    "quota_max": -1,
    "quota_renews": 1449051461,
    "quota_remaining": -1,
    "quota_renewal_rate": 60,
    "access_rights": {
      "ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2": {
        "api_id": "ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2",
        "api_name": "test-api",
        "versions": ["Default"]
      }
    },
    "meta_data": {}
  }' https://admin.cloud.tyk.io/api/keys | python -mjson.tool

You will see a 200 response with your new key:

{
  "api_model": {},
  "key_id": "59bf9159adbab8abcdefghijac9299a1271641b94fbaf9913e0e048c",
  "data": {...}
}

The value returned in the key_id parameter of the response is the access key you can now use to access the API that was specified in the access_rights section of the call.

Tutorial: Create an API Key with the Dashboard

The Tyk Dashboard is the simplest way to generate a new Key.

We have a video walkthrough for creating an API Key.

Step 1: Select “Keys” from the “System Management” section

Keys menu

Step 2: Click CREATE

Add key

Step 3: Add a Policy or API to your Key

You have the option to add your new key to either an existing Policy or an existing individual API. For this Tutorial we are going to use an API.

Add an API to your Key

To select an API, you can either:

Scroll through your API Name list
Use the Search field
You can also Group by Authentication Type to filter your APIs
You can also Group by Category

You can leave all other options at their default settings.

Step 4: Add Configuration Details

You use the Configuration section to set the following:

Enable Detailed Logging. This is disabled by default and isn’t required for this tutorial
Give your Key an Alias. This makes your key easier
Set an Expiry time after which the key will expire. Select a value from the drop-down list. This is a required setting. See Key Expiry for more details.
Add Tags to your policy. Any tags you add can be used when filtering Analytics Data. Tags are case sensitive.
Add Metadata to your policy. Adding metadata such as User IDs can be used by middleware components. See Session Metadata for more details.

Step 4: Click CREATE

Create button

Key success message location

That’s it, you’ve created a key - now we can try and use it.

Tutorial: Create an API Key with the API

To create an API key, we will need the API ID that we wish to grant the key access to. Creating the token is then a simple API call to the endpoint.

You will also need your own API Key, to get these values:

Select Users from the System Management section.
In the users list, click Edit for your user.
The API key is the Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials, copy this somewhere you can reference it.
Select APIs from the System Management section.
From the Actions menu for your API, select Copy API ID

API ID location

Once you have these values, you can use them to access the Dashboard API, the below curl command will generate a key for one of your APIs:

Note:

Replace the authorization header value with your Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials
Replace the API ID (ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2) with your API ID
It’s recommended to validate the JSON using JSON validator to avoid any malformed input error

curl -X POST -H "authorization: 1238b7e0e2ff4c2957321724409ee2eb" \
  -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{
    "allowance": 1000,
    "rate": 1000,
    "per": 1,
    "expires": -1,
    "quota_max": -1,
    "quota_renews": 1449051461,
    "quota_remaining": -1,
    "quota_renewal_rate": 60,
    "access_rights": {
      "ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2": {
        "api_id": "ad5004d961a147d4649fd3216694ebe2",
        "api_name": "test-api",
        "versions": ["Default"]
      }
    },
    "meta_data": {}
  }' https://admin.cloud.tyk.io/api/keys | python -mjson.tool

You will see a response with your new key:

{
  "action": "create",
  "key": "c2cb92a78f944e9a46de793fe28e847e",
  "status": "ok"
}

The value returned in the key parameter of the response is the access key you can now use to access the API that was specified in the access_rights section of the call

To create an API Key, we will need the API ID that we wish to grant the key access to, then creating the key is a very simple API call to the endpoint.

Prerequisite

You will need your API secret, this is the secret property of the tyk.conf file.

Once you have this value, you can use them to access the Gateway API, the below curl command will generate a key for one of your APIs, remember to replace {API-SECRET}, {API-ID} and {API-NAME} with the real values as well as the curl domain name and port to be the correct values for your environment.

curl -X POST -H "x-tyk-authorization: {API-SECRET}" \
  -s \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{
    "allowance": 1000,
    "rate": 1000,
    "per": 1,
    "expires": -1,
    "quota_max": -1,
    "org_id": "1",
    "quota_renews": 1449051461,
    "quota_remaining": -1,
    "quota_renewal_rate": 60,
    "access_rights": {
      "{API-ID}": {
        "api_id": "{API-ID}",
        "api_name": "{API-NAME}",
        "versions": ["Default"]
      }
    },
    "meta_data": {}
  }' http://localhost:8080/tyk/keys/create | python -mjson.tool

You will see a response with your new key:

{
  "action": "create",
  "key": "c2cb92a78f944e9a46de793fe28e847e",
  "status": "ok"
}

The value returned in the key parameter of the response is the access key you can now use to access the API that was specified in the access_rights section of the call.

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