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Tyk Dashboard Admin APIs For Tyk On-Premises installations only, the Dashboard Admin API is used to set up and provision a Tyk Dashboard instance without the command line. It provides the following administrator-level functions:
  • Managing organizations
  • Creating initial users during boot-strapping of the system
  • Forcing a URL reload
  • Exporting and importing Tyk assets (organizations, APIs and policies) for backup, or when migrating between environments; imported assets retain their base IDs so that they continue to work together
  • Setting up SSO integration

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Authentication

In order to use the Dashboard Admin API, you’ll need to get the admin_secret value from your Tyk Dashboard configurations. The secret you set should then be sent along as a header with each Dashboard Admin API Request in order for it to be successful:
In a production environment, you must change the default admin_secret in the tyk_analytics.conf file. Admin APIs use this value for authentication, and you should set it in the admin-auth header while sending the request.
Important Note on Spelling:While our documentation now uses American English (en-us), the product itself, including all user interfaces, configuration fields, environment variables, and APIs, continues to use British English spellings. When interacting with the product, please continue using the British English (en-gb) spellings as appear in the interface and API. This change does not affect how you use the product; all functionality remains the same.
Example: The API endpoint /organisations uses British spelling (with an ‘s’ not ‘z’). In all other instances, such as when describing or referring to this object in the documentation, we will use the American spelling “organization” with a ‘z’.

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Organizations

Many businesses have a complex structure, for example a lot of distinct departments where each department has its own teams. You might also need to deploy and manage multiple environments such as Production, Staging and QA for different stages in your product workflow. The Tyk Dashboard is multi-tenant capable which allows you to use a single Tyk Dashboard to host separate organizations for each team or environment. An Organization is a completely isolated unit, and has its own:
  • API Definitions
  • API Keys
  • Users
  • Developers
  • Domain
  • Tyk Classic Portal
When bootstrapping your Dashboard, the first thing the bootstrap script does is to create a new default Organization. Additional organizations can be created and managed using the Dashboard Admin API.

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Tyk Gateway and organizations

The concept of an organization does not exist within the Tyk Gateway. Gateways only proxy and validate the rules imposed on them by the definitions and keys that are being processed, however at their core there are some security checks within the Gateway that ensure organizational ownership of objects. Tyk allows each organization to own its own set of Gateways, for example when you want to use different hosting providers you can segregate them in terms of resources, or just for security reasons. Self-Managed users should use API tagging and enforce a tagging standard across all organizations. All actions in a Self-Managed installation of Tyk must use a base Organization, and all actions should stem from a User owned by that organization.
A user that does not belong to an Organization is sometimes referred to as an unbounded user. These users have visibility across all Organizations, but should be granted read-only access.