Publish an API to Developer Portal with Tyk Operator

Last updated: Aug 1, 2025

Introduction

For Tyk Self Managed or Tyk Cloud, you can set up a Developer Portal to expose a facade of your APIs and then allow third-party developers to register and use your APIs. You can make use of Tyk Operator CRDs to publish the APIs as part of your CI/CD workflow. If you have followed this Getting Started guide to create the httpbin example API, you can publish it to your Tyk Classic Developer Portal in a few steps.

Note
Currently Operator only supports publishing Tyk Classic API to the Tyk Classic Portal.

Publish an API with Tyk Operator

1. Creating a security policy

When you publish an API to the Portal, Tyk actually publishes a way for developers to enroll in a policy, not into the API directly. Therefore, you should first set up a security policy for the developers, before proceeding with the publishing.

To do that, you can use the following command:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: tyk.tyk.io/v1alpha1
kind: SecurityPolicy
metadata:
 name: standard-pol
spec:
 name: standard-pol
 active: true
 state: active
 access_rights_array:
 - name: httpbin
   namespace: default
   versions:
     - Default
EOF

The above command will create a basic security policy and attribute it to the httpbin API that was previously created.

2. Creating an API description

The Tyk Classic Developer Portal enables you to host your API documentation in Swagger/OpenAPI or API Blueprint for developers to use. In the case of Swagger/OpenAPI, you can either paste your Swagger content (JSON or YAML) in the CRD, or via a link to a public Swagger hosted URL, which can then be rendered by using Swagger UI.

Create a file called apidesc.yaml, then add the following;

apiVersion: tyk.tyk.io/v1alpha1
kind: APIDescription
metadata:
 name: standard-desc
spec:
 name: HTTPBIN API
 policyRef:
  name: standard-pol
  namespace: default
 docs:
  doc_type: swagger_custom_url
  documentation: "https://httpbin.org/spec.json"
 show: true
 version: v2

3. Apply the changes

kubectl apply -f apidesc.yaml

Or, if you don’t have the manifest with you, you can run the following command:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: tyk.tyk.io/v1alpha1
kind: APIDescription
metadata:
 name: standard-desc
spec:
 name: HTTPBIN API
 policyRef:
  name: standard-pol
  namespace: default
 docs:
  doc_type: swagger_custom_url
  documentation: "https://httpbin.org/spec.json"
 show: true
 version: v2
EOF

4. Creating a PortalAPICatalog resource

Unlike other platforms, Tyk will not auto-publish your APIs to the Portal, instead they are presented as a facade, you choose what APIs and what Policies to expose to the Portal. You can configure what APIs and what Policies to expose to the Portal via Tyk Operator by creating a PortalAPICatalog resource.

Create a file called api_portal.yaml, then add the following:

apiVersion: tyk.tyk.io/v1alpha1
kind: PortalAPICatalogue
metadata:
 name: test-httpbin-api
spec:
 apis:
 - apiDescriptionRef:
    name: standard-desc
    namespace: default

You have added your API Descriptions under apis.

5. Apply the changes

kubectl apply -f api_portal.yaml

Now your new API and its documentation is loaded to the Developer Portal.

APIDescription CRD

Different types of documents are supported:

Swagger Documents:

doc_type: swagger
documentation: Base64 encoded swagger doc

Swagger Hosted URL:

doc_type: swagger_custom_url
documentation: The URL to the swagger documentation, for example “https://httpbin.org/spec.json"

GraphQL:

doc_type: graphql