Discovering Declarative Schemas

Goal

You will use kongctl to discover supported declarative resources, inspect their fields, and generate starter YAML.

Note: This chapter shows how kongctl self describes the resources it supports. Human users may find this useful, but the real power use case is coding agents which can use the CLI itself as the basis for generating declarative configurations.

List supported resources

Run explain without a resource path to see what kongctl supports:

kongctl explain

Resource paths can describe a top-level resource, a child, or a specific field.

Explain a resource

Inspect the fields available for an AI Gateway:

kongctl explain ai_gateway

Move deeper into a child resource by extending the path:

kongctl explain ai_gateway.models

Add --extended for more field detail, or use -o json to retrieve the machine-readable schema.

Generate starter YAML

Generate a commented AI Gateway example:

kongctl scaffold ai_gateway

explain answers what a resource supports. scaffold provides YAML that you can adapt when you extend the AI Gateway configuration from the previous lesson.