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Tyk API Gateway

Tyk Gateway is the cloud-native, open source, enterprise-ready API and AI Gateway supporting REST, GraphQL, TCP, gRPC and MCP (Model Context Protocol).

Built from the ground up, as the fastest API Gateway on the planet since 2014.

Tyk Gateway is provided ‘Batteries-included’, with no feature lockout. Enabling your organization to rate limit, auth, gather analytics, apply microservice patterns and more with ease.

There are three different ways you can try Tyk:

Get Started

We’ll install Tyk, add auth, analytics, quotas and rate limiting to your API in under 5 minutes.

We recommend Tyk Gateway Docker as the quickest way to get started now. Later, you can move to one of our other supported distributions if you prefer.

Step 1 - Clone the docker-compose repository

git clone https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk-gateway-docker

Step 2 - Change to the new directory

cd tyk-gateway-docker

Step 3 - Deploy Tyk Gateway and Redis

docker-compose up

You can run this in detach mode using the -d flag: docker-compose up -d

Congratulations, you’re done!

Your Tyk Gateway is now configured and ready to use. Confirm this by checking against the ‘hello’ endpoint:

curl localhost:8080/hello

Output:

{"status": "pass", "version": "v3.2.1", "description": "Tyk GW"}

Next, visit adding your first API to Tyk and follow the Open Source instructions.

Other Installations are available:

1. Docker
2. Kubernetes-Native
3. Kubernetes-Helm
4. Ansible
5. Red Hat
6. Ubuntu
7. CentOS
8. Compile Tyk from Source

Getting started with AI Gateway for LLM and MCP

Tyk Gateway governs MCP traffic from AI agents, applying authentication, rate limiting and per-tool access control to every JSON-RPC call. Tyk AI Studio handles LLM management, with model routing, budgets and guardrails across providers. Start at the AI management overview.

Open Source API Gateway Features

Use any protocol: REST (with native OpenAPI support), SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC, TCP, and MCP.

MCP Gateway: Put the gateway in front of remote Model Context Protocol servers so AI agent traffic is authenticated, rate limited and auditable. Tyk parses JSON-RPC 2.0 and applies policy per tool, resource and prompt rather than treating MCP as opaque HTTP.

API to MCP: Generate an MCP proxy directly from a REST API in Tyk Gateway, without building or hosting a separate MCP server.

Industry Standard Authentication: JWT, bearer Tokens, Basic Auth, Client Certificates and more.

Open API Standards: Import your Swagger and OpenAPI Documents (OAS 2.X and OAS 3.0.1) to scaffold APIs in Tyk.

Ultra performant: Low latency, and thousands of rps with just a single CPU, horizontally and vertically scalable.

Content mediation: Transform all the things, from request or response headers to converting between SOAP and GraphQL.

Extensible Plugin Architecture: Customize Tyk’s middleware chain by writing plugins in your language of choice - from Python to Javascript to Go, or any language which supports gRPC.

Rate Limiting & Quotas: Protect your upstreams from becoming overloaded and/or apply limits for each consumer.

API Versioning - API Versions can be easily set and sunset (deprecated) at a specific time and date.

Granular Access Control - Grant access to one or more APIs on a per version and operation basis.

Blocklist/Allowlist/Ignore endpoint access - Enforce strict security models on a version-by-version basis to your access points.

Analytics logging - Record detailed usage data on who is using your APIs (raw data only)

CORS - Enable CORS for certain APIs so users can make browser-based requests

Webhooks - Trigger webhooks against events such as Quota Violations and Authentication failures

IP AllowListing - Block access to non-trusted IP addresses for more secure interactions

Hitless reloads - Tyk configurations can be altered dynamically and the service restarted without affecting any active request

Kubernetes native declarative API: using Open Source Tyk Operator (more info in OSS section)

Tyk Technologies uses the same API Gateway for all it’s applications. Protecting, securing, and processing APIs for thousands of organizations and businesses around the world. Ideal for Open Banking, building software in the clouds as well as exposing APIs to teams, partners & consumers.

Tyk OSS Integrations

Tyk Technologies maintains other Open Source Software which can be used in conjunction with Tyk API Gateway:

Tyk AI Studio - Open source (AGPL-3.0) AI management platform for LLM traffic: model routing, budgets and cost controls, RAG data sources, tools and agents, with governance across providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Hugging Face and Ollama. Use it alongside Tyk Gateway when you need LLM and AI management rather than MCP proxying. Docs

Tyk Pump - Pluggable analytics purger to move Analytics generated by your Tyk nodes to any back-end.

Tyk Identity Broker - Tyk Authentication Proxy for third-party login

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

Tyk Mserv - Asset Server and gRPC host

Documentation

All the documentation for Tyk Gateway and other OSS-related topics can be found at https://tyk.io/docs/tyk-open-source

Community

• Tyk Community Board - Technical support from the Tyk Community
• Write a GitHub Issue - Feature requests & bug reports welcome
• Technical blog - Tyk announcements and updates
• Newsletters - Subscribe to our GraphQL & API newsletters
• If you are using Tyk give us a star ⭐️

Licensing

Tyk is dual-licensed:

1. Open Source License: The code in the root directory and all subdirectories except the 'ee' folder is released under the MPL v2.0. Please see LICENSE for the full version of the open source license.

2. Commercial License: The code in the 'ee' folder is subject to a commercial license. For more information about obtaining a commercial license, please contact our sales team at [email protected].

Compiling Tyk Gateway

Compile from Source

git clone https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk
go build

Go version 1.22 is required to build master, the current development version. Tyk is officially supported on Linux/amd64, Linux/i386 and Linux/arm64.

To run tests locally use the following command:

go test ./...

Note that tests require Redis to be running on the same machine (default port).

To write your own test please use this guide https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk/blob/master/TESTING.md

Contributing

For more information about contributing PRs and issues, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

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