Gateway on Red Hat (RHEL) / CentOS

Last updated: 5 minutes read.

Requirements

Ansible - required for running the commands below. Use the Shell tab for instructions to install Tyk from a shell.

Getting Started

  1. clone the tyk-ansible repositry
$ git clone https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk-ansible
  1. cd into the directory
$ cd tyk-ansible
  1. Run initialisation script to initialise environment
$ sh scripts/init.sh
  1. Modify hosts.yml file to update ssh variables to your server(s). You can learn more about the hosts file here

  2. Run ansible-playbook to install tyk-gateway

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yaml -t `tyk-gateway-pro` or `tyk-gateway-hybrid`

Supported Distributions

Distribution Version Supported
Amazon Linux 2
CentOS 8
CentOS 7
RHEL 8
RHEL 7

Variables

  • vars/tyk.yaml
Variable Default Comments
secrets.APISecret 352d20ee67be67f6340b4c0605b044b7 API secret
secrets.AdminSecret 12345 Admin secret
gateway.service.host Gateway server host if different than the hosts url
gateway.service.port 8080 Gateway server listening port
gateway.service.proto http Gateway server protocol
gateway.service.tls false Set to true to enable SSL connections
gateway.sharding.enabled false Set to true to enable filtering (sharding) of APIs
gateway.sharding.tags The tags to use when filtering (sharding) Tyk Gateway nodes. Tags are processed as OR operations. If you include a non-filter tag (e.g. an identifier such as node-id-1, this will become available to your Dashboard analytics)
gateway.rpc.connString Use this setting to add the URL for your MDCB or load balancer host
gateway.rpc.useSSL true Set this option to true to use an SSL RPC connection
gateway.rpc.sslInsecureSkipVerify true Set this option to true to allow the certificate validation (certificate chain and hostname) to be skipped. This can be useful if you use a self-signed certificate
gateway.rpc.rpcKey Your organisation ID to connect to the MDCB installation
gateway.rpc.apiKey This the API key of a user used to authenticate and authorise the Gateway’s access through MDCB. The user should be a standard Dashboard user with minimal privileges so as to reduce any risk if the user is compromised. The suggested security settings are read for Real-time notifications and the remaining options set to deny
gateway.rpc.groupId This is the zone that this instance inhabits, e.g. the cluster/data-centre the Gateway lives in. The group ID must be the same across all the Gateways of a data-centre/cluster which are also sharing the same Redis instance. This ID should also be unique per cluster (otherwise another Gateway cluster can pick up your keyspace events and your cluster will get zero updates).

Install Tyk API Gateway on Red Hat

Tyk has it’s own signed RPMs in a YUM repository hosted by the kind folks at packagecloud.io, which makes it easy, safe and secure to install a trusted distribution of the Tyk Gateway stack.

This tutorial will run on an Amazon AWS Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 instance. We will install Tyk Gateway with all dependencies stored locally.

We’re installing on a t2.micro because this is a tutorial, you’ll need more RAM and more cores for better performance.

This configuration should also work (with some tweaks) for CentOS.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure port 8080 is open: this is used in this guide for Gateway traffic (API traffic to be proxied)
  • EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a free, community based repository project from Fedora which provides high quality add-on software packages for Linux distribution including RHEL, CentOS, and Scientific Linux. EPEL isn’t a part of RHEL/CentOS but it is designed for major Linux distributions. In our case we need it for Redis. Install EPEL using the instructions here.

Step 1: Set up YUM Repositories

First, we need to install some software that allows us to use signed packages:

sudo yum install pygpgme yum-utils wget

Next, we need to set up the various repository configurations for Tyk and MongoDB:

Step 2: Create Tyk Gateway Repository Configuration

Create a file named /etc/yum.repos.d/tyk_tyk-gateway.repo that contains the repository configuration below https://packagecloud.io/tyk/tyk-gateway/install#manual-rpm:

[tyk_tyk-gateway]
name=tyk_tyk-gateway
baseurl=https://packagecloud.io/tyk/tyk-gateway/el/7/$basearch
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://keyserver.tyk.io/tyk.io.rpm.signing.key.2020
       https://packagecloud.io/tyk/tyk-gateway/gpgkey
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
metadata_expire=300

Step 3: Install Packages

We’re ready to go, you can now install the relevant packages using yum:

sudo yum install -y redis tyk-gateway

(you may be asked to accept the GPG key for our two repos and when the package installs, hit yes to continue)

Step 4: Start Redis

In many cases Redis will not be running, so let’s start those:

sudo service redis start

When Tyk is finished installing, it will have installed some init scripts, but it will not be running yet. The next step will be to setup the Gateway – thankfully this can be done with three very simple commands.

Configure Tyk Gateway with the Dashboard

Prerequisites

This configuration assumes that you have already installed Tyk Dashboard, and have decided on the domain names for your Dashboard and your Portal. They must be different. For testing purposes, it is easiest to add hosts entries to your (and your servers) /etc/hosts file.

Set up Tyk

You can set up the core settings for Tyk Gateway with a single setup script, however for more involved deployments, you will want to provide your own configuration file.

Note

You need to replace <hostname> for --redishost=<hostname>with your own value to run this script.

sudo /opt/tyk-gateway/install/setup.sh --dashboard=1 --listenport=8080 --redishost=<hostname> --redisport=6379

What we’ve done here is told the setup script that:

  • --dashboard=1: We want to use the Dashboard, since Tyk Gateway gets all it’s API Definitions from the Dashboard service, as of v2.3 Tyk will auto-detect the location of the dashboard, we only need to specify that we should use this mode.
  • --listenport=8080: Tyk should listen on port 8080 for API traffic.
  • --redishost=<hostname>: Use Redis on the hostname: localhost.
  • --redisport=6379: Use the default Redis port.

Starting Tyk

The Tyk Gateway can be started now that it is configured. Use this command to start the Tyk Gateway:

sudo service tyk-gateway start

Pro Tip: Domains with Tyk Gateway

Tyk Gateway has full domain support built-in, you can:

  • Set Tyk to listen only on a specific domain for all API traffic.
  • Set an API to listen on a specific domain (e.g. api1.com, api2.com).
  • Split APIs over a domain using a path (e.g. api.com/api1, api.com/api2, moreapis.com/api1, moreapis.com/api2 etc).
  • If you have set a hostname for the Gateway, then all non-domain-bound APIs will be on this hostname + the listen_path.