Browsing Konnect

Goal

You will list live Konnect resources and recognize the difference between imperative commands and declarative configuration.

List a resource collection

Use get without a resource name or ID to list the collection:

kongctl get apis

An empty result is valid when the organization does not contain any APIs.

Get one resource

If the list contains an API, pass its name or ID to the resource command. Quote names that contain spaces:

Note: These commands won’t show anything until you have resources in your Konnect organization. Later lessons help you set up resources via declarative configuration. Or you can use the UI to create resources and view them in kongctl.

kongctl get apis "My Simple API" -o text

NAME           DESCRIPTION               ID
My Simple API  The simplest API example  45d7…

Use the full ID and JSON output to inspect the complete structured response:

kongctl get apis 45d79870-eb41-4c23-b51b-99123de692ea -o json

{
  "api_spec_ids": [],
  "attributes": {},
  "created_at": "2026-07-29T19:53:39.413Z",
  "current_version_summary": null,
  "description": "The simplest API example",
  "id": "45d79870-eb41-4c23-b51b-99123de692ea",
  "labels": {
    "KONGCTL-namespace": "default"
  },
  "name": "My Simple API",
  "portals": [],
  "slug": "my-simple-api",
  "updated_at": "2026-07-29T19:53:39.413Z",
  "version": null
}

Explore interactively

Open the interactive resource viewer from a terminal:

kongctl view

Use the on-screen keys to navigate resources and press q to exit.

Note: If the default color theme does not show text clearly in your terminal, cycle through the available themes by pressing t and T. Once you find a desirable theme, configure it permanently by setting <profile>.color-theme: <theme-name>. See the next chapter for CLI configuration options.

Imperative vs declarative

The commands in this lesson are imperative read-only commands. kongctl does not support (at this time) creating or updating Konnect resources with imperative commands. Instead, declarative configuration is the method of managing Konnect resources by defining the desired state in input configuration and then applying it to your organization. kongctl compares that desired input with live Konnect state and plans the operations needed to reconcile them.

The declarative configuration chapter will explain resource creation in more detail.