Kong Manager authentication in Enterprise free mode

[vrlorad]

I manage to run Kong Manager in Enterprise free mode and I can see default workspace with all services, routes and consumers I created by using Admin API. Also, it is possible to add new consumers, create services and routes and assign plugins etc.
As I understood, since I do not have license I am limited only to default workspace and there is no possibility do add new users and roles since for RBAC I need license for this as well.
But what about Kong Manager authentication? I have enabled basic-auth for kong_admin_gui_auth and my expectation was that I would be able to get login form and use super admin user to log in but I get "Authentication is not enabled" when go to:

https://kong-manager.my-domain.com/login

Is it possible to enable authentication in Kong Manager Enterprise Free mode or I need to obtain licensed version for this?

Also, this is part of my values.yaml from Helm chart where I enabled the basic-auth:

enterprise:
  enabled: true
  # CHANGEME: https://github.com/Kong/charts/blob/main/charts/kong/README.md#kong-enterprise-license
  license_secret: 
  vitals:
    enabled: true
  portal:
    enabled: false
  rbac:
    enabled: true
    admin_gui_auth: basic-auth
    session_conf_secret: kong-session-config
  smtp:
    enabled: false

Thanks in advance for any help!

[choyri]

admin_gui_auth Available with Enterprise subscription
After spending a long time deploy enterprise free mode, I found this fatal problem. I think this free mode is completely unworkable in a formal setting and should only be used as a trial. Another problem is that the free mode Manager has too many "xxx disabled" prompts. 😢

[vrlorad]

@choyri
As a matter of fact, I found that Kong Manager in Free mode can be used for the most basic stuff I expect to be managed through GUI except the GUI authentication which I consider to be mandatory. RBAC is not so important as I need only one user to handle the whole administration, but protecting Kong Manager access is a must.

[vrlorad]

Also, what is confusing is that there is a statement that Free mode has RBAC enabled as per https://konghq.com/pricing:

but obviously this refers to cloud version (Konnect) and not self-managed version of Kong Gateway.

[choyri]

which I consider to be mandatory

I couldn't agree more

[onaralili]

What is point to have Kong Manager if you cannot secure it? Did you find a workaround?

[masudrashid]

@vrlorad
Can you describe how did you enable Kong Manager GUI without enterprise license? I'm trying this for a while. I'm using official Kong docker image and docker-compose similar to this. I'm using kong as db-less (declarative config in kong.yml), without kubernetes

[choyri]

You should running Kong Gateway with a database, see more.

[sbusso]

You can set the Admin Gui as a service and authentication in front. The Gui has to listen to only localhost KONG_ADMIN_GUI_LISTEN=127.0.0.1:8002