Getting Started with APISIX: Install, Configure, and Test a High‑Performance API Gateway

2019 Oct 17, the subsidiary ZhiLiu Technology API gateway APISIX entered Apache incubation. The author noted that the company’s top OpenResty experts, Wen Ming and Wang Yuansheng, authored "OpenResty Best Practices," which is quite interesting.

APISIX is a high‑performance, extensible microservice API gateway based on Nginx and etcd. Compared with traditional API gateways, APISIX provides load balancing, logging, authentication and other functions through plugins.

Dynamic load balancing: supports dynamic load balancing for different upstream services

Security plugins: built‑in security layer supporting OAuth2, ACL, CORS, dynamic SSL, IP restrictions, etc.

Traffic control plugins: rate limiting, request size limiting, response speed limiting, and more

Analytics and monitoring plugins: visualizing API traffic via Prometheus, Datadog, Runscope, etc.

Logging plugins: record request/response logs and send them via HTTP, TCP, UDP to systems such as StatsD or Syslog

Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/iresty

Compared with

Kong

and

Traefik

, the source code is much simpler.

Installation

Install OpenResty

Based on OpenResty, remember that

OpenResty

is a high‑performance web platform built on Nginx and Lua.

<ol><li><code>yum install yum-utils</code></li><li><code>yum-config-manager --add-repo https://openresty.org/package/centos/openresty.repo</code></li><li><code>yum install -y openresty</code></li></ol>

Install etcd

etcd

is a strongly consistent key‑value NoSQL database. Unlike Kong, which uses PostgreSQL, etcd is a notable advantage.

<ol><li><code>yum install -y etcd</code></li><li><code>service etcd start</code></li><li><code>yum install -y https://github.com/iresty/apisix/releases/download/v0.8/apisix-0.8-0.el7.noarch.rpm</code></li></ol>

Start APISIX

<ol><li><code>sudo apisix start</code></li></ol>

Access the dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:9080/apisix/dashboard/ . Note: the login feature is not implemented.

Feature Experience

Goal: implement reverse proxy for web services with rate limiting.

upstream > Add

2. routes > Add

Token bucket rate limiting configuration

rate – flow per second

burst – token bucket capacity

key – header used for limiting

rejected_code – error code returned

Visit ip:9080/ to experience rate limiting

Online Demo Version

The official site provides an online dashboard for exploring APISIX: http://apisix.iresty.com