View the request Kong Gateway receives on demand using the Request Termination plugin

When troubleshooting an issue, you may need to see the full request Kong receives — including headers and request body — without exposing that data for every request.

The Request Termination plugin allows for this behavior.

By setting config.echo to true the Gateway will echo back the following data:

• node_id: Node ID of the Kong node that handled the request
• worker_pid: nginx worker PID that handled the request
• hostname: The hostname of the machine that handled the request
• request scheme: The scheme component of the request’s URL.
• request_host: The host component of the request’s URL, or the value of the “Host” header
• request port: The port component of the request’s URL
• request_headers: The request headers received by Kong
• request_query: The query arguments obtained from the query string
• request_body: The request body received by Kong
• request_method: The HTTP method of the request.
• request_path: The normalized path component of the request’s URL
• matched_route: The Kong route that matched the request (including route properties such as path, protocols, strip_path, etc.)
• matched_service: The Kong service that matched the request (including service properties such as connect/read/write timeouts, etc.)

To set this on-demand, configure the config.trigger setting to an arbitrary string. Doing so allows only requests containing this string as a header or query parameter to activate the plugin and echo back the request.

For example: config.trigger=x-gruber

curl -H "x-gruber:1" localhost:8000/echo --data "name":"value"
(output shortened for readability)

"kong": {..."hostname": "kong-node1},
  "message": "Service unavailable",
  "matched_service": {..."read_timeout": 60000,"path": "/anything"},
  "matched_route": {..."path_handling": "v0","paths": ["/echo"],"strip_path": true},
  "request": {
    "path": "/echo",
    "headers": {..."host": "localhost:8000","x-gruber": "1" },
    "port": 8000,
    "host": "localhost",
    "method": "POST",
    "scheme": "http",
    "raw_body": "name:value"
  }
}