api-gateway

A guide to building and operating APIs with Amazon API Gateway, an AWS service that connects applications and controls how they communicate. It covers REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design APIs, create infrastructure templates, configure custom domains and authorization, and troubleshoot errors, timeouts, and CORS problems.
Why use it?
It helps you choose the right API type and work through setup, security, access limits, cross-origin requests, and common errors.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/awslabs/agent-plugins/api-gateway
Any agent
npx skills add awslabs/agent-plugins --skill api-gateway
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/awslabs/agent-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 108 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,578 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00108 $0.03578
Opus 5 $0.00054 $0.01789
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00716
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00358

Measured 2d ago against content hash c0971ab0e5e6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-gateway scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/aws-serverless/skills/api-gateway/SKILL.md · 207 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 207 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Amazon API Gateway Development

Expert guidance for building, managing, governing, and operating APIs with Amazon API Gateway. Covers REST APIs (v1), HTTP APIs (v2), and WebSocket APIs.

How to Use This Skill

When answering API Gateway questions:

  1. Read the relevant reference file(s) before responding, do not rely solely on this summary
  2. For tasks spanning multiple concerns (e.g., "private API with mTLS and custom domain"), read all relevant references
  3. When the user needs IaC templates, consult references/sam-cloudformation.md or references/sam-service-integrations.md and provide complete, working SAM/CloudFormation YAML
  4. Always mention relevant pitfalls and limits that affect the user's design

Quick Decision: Which API Type?

Choose the right API type first. This decision affects every downstream choice.

REST API is the full-featured API management platform for enterprises. It provides the governance, security, monetization, and operational controls that organizations need to build, publish, and manage APIs at scale, including usage plans with per-consumer throttling and quotas, API keys, request validation, WAF integration, resource policies, caching, canary deployments, and private endpoints.

HTTP API is the lightweight, low-cost proxy optimized for simpler API workloads. It offers ~70% lower cost and lower latency but trades away the API management features. Choose HTTP API when you need a fast, lightweight proxy to Lambda or HTTP backends and don't require the enterprise controls above.

Factor REST API (v1) HTTP API (v2) WebSocket API
Positioning Full API management Low-cost proxy Real-time bidirectional
Cost Higher ~70% cheaper Per-message pricing
Latency Higher Lower Persistent connection
Max timeout 50ms-29s (up to 300s Regional/Private) 30s hard limit 29s
Payload 10 MB 10 MB 128 KB message / 32 KB frame
API Management
Usage plans/API keys Yes No No
Request validation Yes (JSON Schema draft 4) No No
Caching Yes (0.5-237 GB) No No
Custom gateway responses Yes No No
VTL mapping templates Yes No (parameter mapping only) Yes
Security & Governance
WAF Yes No (use CloudFront + WAF) No
Resource policies Yes No No
Private endpoints Yes No No
mTLS Yes (Regional custom domain only) Yes (Regional custom domain only) Via CloudFront viewer mTLS
Auth
Lambda authorizer Yes (TOKEN + REQUEST) Yes (REQUEST only, simple + IAM policy format) Yes (REQUEST on $connect only)
JWT authorizer No (use Cognito authorizer) Yes (native) No
Cognito authorizer Yes (native) Use JWT authorizer No
Operations
Canary deployments Yes No No
Response streaming Yes No No
X-Ray tracing Yes No No
Execution logging Yes No Yes
Custom domain sharing Not with WebSocket Not with WebSocket Not with REST/HTTP

Read the full file on GitHub · 207 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 207 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A c0971ab0e5e6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-gateway is a skill published in the GitHub repository awslabs/agent-plugins (876 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 3,578 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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