Install krakend with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• krakend

Project history

KrakenD's own team page says the project started in late 2016 as a library for engineers to create fast and reliable API gateways. The Community Edition repository was created on GitHub on 2017-12-03 and describes KrakenD CE as the open-source distribution of KrakenD.

The project later separated the reusable gateway engine from the product distribution. KrakenD documentation says the engine was formerly the KrakenD Framework and became the Lura Project when it joined the Linux Foundation in 2021.

Adoption history

KrakenD was adopted by teams using microservices and backend-for-frontend patterns because it emphasizes stateless nodes, declarative configuration, composition, rate limiting, telemetry integration, JWT/security features, and low operational overhead.

The official case-study and documentation corpus positions KrakenD as a production gateway for cloud-native and self-hosted environments, while Homebrew packaging gives developers a local CLI path for validating and running gateway configs.

How it is used

The normal package-manager workflow installs the krakend binary, then runs it against a configuration file commonly named krakend.json. Official docs describe /etc/krakend/krakend.json as the default container-style path and krakend.json as the simple local configuration name.

KrakenD configurations declare endpoint arrays and backend relationships, with extra_config sections used by optional components outside Lura's core behavior.

Why package nerds care

KrakenD is interesting because it packages an API gateway as a Go CLI/server binary with config-first operations. The Lura split also makes it a visible example of a productized open-source distribution built over a reusable framework governed separately.

Timeline

• 2016: KrakenD started as a library for creating API gateways.
• 2017-12-03: The krakend-ce GitHub repository was created.
• 2019: KrakenD 1.0 was announced.
• 2021: The KrakenD Framework became the Lura Project under the Linux Foundation.
• 2022-06-15: KrakenD v2.0.5 recorded the organization rename from devopsfaith to krakend in the official changelog.

Related projects

• Lura is KrakenD's engine and the direct framework-level related project. KrakenD also belongs to the broader API gateway ecosystem alongside products such as Kong, Tyk, and other reverse proxy or service-edge gateways.

Sources

• https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce
• https://www.krakend.io/blog/announcing-krakend-1.0/
• https://www.krakend.io/blog/krakend-framework-joins-the-linux-foundation/
• https://www.krakend.io/changelog/
• https://www.krakend.io/docs/overview/
• https://www.krakend.io/docs/overview/lura-vs-krakend/
• https://www.krakend.io/team/