decK

decK is Kong's declarative configuration CLI for comparing, exporting, validating, and applying gateway state. It works against Kong Gateway and Konnect control planes while also providing local file transforms for common API ops workflows.

• Export live gateway or Konnect configuration, diff it against versioned state files, and sync or partially apply changes back through the Admin API.
• Validate, render, merge, patch, tag, and lint decK files locally before rollout, including dry-run style drift checks and sanitized dumps.
• Convert OpenAPI specs into decK state, or transform decK files into Kong Ingress Controller manifests and Terraform resources for downstream delivery workflows.

• JSON output is real on drift-oriented commands like gateway diff, gateway sync, and gateway reset, and multiple file subcommands can emit JSON for follow-up parsing.
• Commands are mostly scriptable once credentials are in place, with stdin or stdout defaults plus --yes or --force flags that fit inspect-change-verify loops and CI.
• Best fit is teams already managing Kong declaratively; it is less useful as a generic API client, and live operations depend on reachable Kong or Konnect endpoints.

• deck gateway apply advertises --json-output, but cmd/gateway_apply.go binds that flag to the wrong variable, so structured apply output appears broken.
• Several top-level commands and the konnect group remain for backward compatibility but are marked deprecated in favor of deck gateway and deck file.