Ktor (Kotlin)

Build async Kotlin servers and clients with Ktor. Generate routing, content negotiation, authentication, WebSockets, and HTTP clients using Kotlin coroutines for lightweight, non-blocking backends.

This skill helps you build server-side Kotlin applications with Ktor, JetBrains' async framework. It generates structured routing, serialization with kotlinx.serialization, authentication providers (JWT, OAuth, session), WebSocket handlers, and type-safe HTTP clients — all powered by coroutines.

When to use

Use when building Kotlin backends, creating microservices on JVM with coroutines, or when you want a lightweight alternative to Spring Boot for Kotlin-first development.

Examples

REST API with serialization

Build a typed API with Kotlin serialization

Create a Ktor REST API with kotlinx.serialization, structured routing for a task manager, JWT authentication, and content negotiation for JSON

HTTP client with retries

Build a resilient API client

Set up a Ktor HTTP client with retry logic, timeouts, request/response logging, and kotlinx.serialization for consuming a third-party REST API