tyk-sync

Tyk Sync

What is it?

Tyk Sync is a command line tool and library to manage and synchronise a Tyk installation with your version control system (VCS).

[!NOTE] The project was originally called tyk-git however this was changed to tyk-sync as it evolved and can now synchronise to files not just git repos.

Features

• Update APIs and policies on remote Tyk Dashboards
• Update APIs on remote Tyk CE Gateways
• Publish APIS/Policies to remote Tyk Dashboards
• Publish APIs to remote Tyk CE Gateways
• Synchronise a Tyk Dashboard's APIs and Policies with your VCS (one-way, definitions are written to the Dashboard)
• Synchronise a Tyk CE Gateway's APIs with those stored in a VCS (one-way, definitions are written to the Gateway)
• Dump Policies and APIs in a transportable format from a Dashboard to a directory
• Support for importing, converting and publishing Swagger (Open API Spec) files to Tyk.
• Specialized support for Git. But since API and policy definitions can be read directly from the file system, it will integrate with any VCS.
• Show and import Tyk examples

Sync

Tyk Sync tries to be clever about what APIs and Policies to update and which to create, it will actually base all ID matching on the API ID and the masked Policy ID, so it can identify the same object across installations. Tyk has a tendency to generate fresh IDs for all new Objects, so Tyk Sync gets around this by using portable IDs and ensuring the necessary portable IDs are set when using the dump command.

This means that Tyk Sync can be used to back-up your most important API Gateway configurations as code, and to deploy those configurations to any target and ensure that API IDs and Policy IDs will remain consistent, ensuring that any dependent tokens continue to have access to your services.

Prerequisites:

• Tyk Sync was built using Go 1.21. The minimum Go version required to install is 1.21.
• In order for policy ID matching to work correctly, your Dashboard must have allow_explicit_policy_id: true and enable_duplicate_slugs: true.
• In order for policy ID matching to work correctly, your Gateway must have policies.allow_explicit_policy_id: true.
• It is assumed you have a Tyk CE or Tyk Pro installation.

Installation

Currently, the application is available via Docker, packagecloud, or can be installed from source. To install from source you must have Go installed.

Go:

To install from source you must have Go installed and run:

go install github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk-sync@latest

[!NOTE] Tyk Sync was built using Go 1.21. The minimum Go version required to install is 1.21.

This should make the tyk-sync command available to your console.

Docker:

To install a particular version of Tyk Sync via docker image please run the following command stating the version you want to use. A list of all available versions can be found on the Tyk Sync Docker Hub page: https://hub.docker.com/r/tykio/tyk-sync/tags

docker pull tykio/tyk-sync:{version_id}

To run tyk-sync as a one-off command and display usage options please do:

docker run -it --rm tykio/tyk-sync:{version_id} help

Then the docker image tyk-sync can be used in the following way:

docker run -it --rm tykio/tyk-sync:{version_id} [flags]
docker run -it --rm tykio/tyk-sync:{version_id} [command]

Usage

Usage:
  tyk-sync [flags]
  tyk-sync [command]

Available Commands:
  dump        Dump will extract policies and APIs from a target (dashboard)
  examples    Shows a list of all available tyk examples
  help        Help about any command
  publish     publish API definitions from a Git repo or file system to a gateway or dashboard
  sync        Synchronise a github repo or file system with a gateway
  update      Update a dashboard or gateway with APIs and policies
  version     This command will show the current Tyk-Sync version

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for tyk-sync

Use "tyk-sync [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Example: Transfer from one Tyk Dashboard to another

First, we need to extract the data from our Tyk Dashboard, here we dump into ./tmp, let's assume this is a git-enabled directory

tyk-sync dump -d="http://localhost:3000" -s="b2d420ca5302442b6f20100f76de7d83" -t="./tmp"
Extracting APIs and Policies from http://localhost:3000
> Fetching policies
--> Identified 1 policies
--> Fetching and cleaning policy objects
> Fetching APIs
--> Fetched 3 APIs
> Creating spec file in: tmp/.tyk.json
Done.

Next, let's push those changes back to the Git repo on the branch my-test-branch:

cd tmp
git add .
git commit -m "My dashboard dump"
git push -u origin my-test-branch

Now to restore this data directly from GitHub:

tyk-sync sync -d="http://localhost:3010" -s="b2d420ca5302442b6f20100f76de7d83" -b="refs/heads/my-test-branch" https://github.com/myname/my-test.git
Using publisher: Dashboard Publisher
Fetched 3 definitions
Fetched 1 policies
Processing APIs...
Deleting: 0
Updating: 3
Creating: 0
SYNC Updating: 598ec94f9695f201730d835b
SYNC Updating: 598ec9589695f201730d835c
SYNC Updating: 5990cfee9695f201730d836e
Processing Policies...
Deleting policies: 0
Updating policies: 1
Creating policies: 0
SYNC Updating Policy: Test policy 1
--> Found policy using explicit ID, substituting remote ID for update

The command provides output to identify which actions have been taken. If using a Tyk Gateway, the Gateway will be automatically hot-reloaded.

Example: Check the currently installed version of Tyk Sync

To check the current Tyk Sync version, we need to run the version command:

tyk-sync version

Example: Import Tyk example into Dashboard

To list all available examples you need to run this command:

tyk-sync examples
LOCATION           NAME                               DESCRIPTION
udg/vat-checker    VAT number checker UDG             Simple REST API wrapped in GQL using Universal Data Graph that allows user to check validity of a VAT number and display some details about it.
udg/geo-info       Geo information about the World    Countries GQL API extended with information from Restcountries

It's also possible to show more details about an example by using its location:

tyk-sync examples show --location="udg/vat-checker"
LOCATION
udg/vat-checker

NAME
VAT number checker UDG

DESCRIPTION
Simple REST API wrapped in GQL using Universal Data Graph that allows user to check validity of a VAT number and display some details about it.

FEATURES
- REST Datasource

MIN TYK VERSION
5.0

To publish it into the Dashboard you will need to use this command:

tyk-sync examples publish -d="http://localhost:3000" -s="b2d420ca5302442b6f20100f76de7d83" -l="udg/vat-checker"
Fetched 1 definitions
Fetched 0 policies
Using publisher: Dashboard Publisher
org override detected, setting.
Creating API 0: vat-validation
--> Status: OK, ID:726e705e6afc432742867e1bd898cb26
Updating API 0: vat-validation
--> Status: OK, ID:726e705e6afc432742867e1bd898cb26
org override detected, setting.
Done