# Consul API Client
This package provides the `api` package which provides programmatic access to the full Consul API.
The full documentation is available on [Godoc ](https://godoc.org/github.com/hashicorp/consul/api ).
## Usage
Below is an example of using the Consul client. To run the example, you must first
[install Consul ](https://developer.hashicorp.com/consul/downloads ) and
[Go ](https://go.dev/doc/install ).
To run the client API, create a new Go module.
```shell
go mod init consul-demo
```
Copy the example code into a file called `main.go` in the directory where the module is defined.
As seen in the example, the Consul API is often imported with the alias `capi` .
```go
package main
import (
"fmt"
capi "github.com/hashicorp/consul/api"
)
func main() {
// Get a new client
client, err := capi.NewClient(capi.DefaultConfig())
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
// Get a handle to the KV API
kv := client.KV()
// PUT a new KV pair
p := & capi.KVPair{Key: "REDIS_MAXCLIENTS", Value: []byte("1000")}
_, err = kv.Put(p, nil)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
// Lookup the pair
pair, _, err := kv.Get("REDIS_MAXCLIENTS", nil)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("KV: %v %s\n", pair.Key, pair.Value)
}
```
Install the Consul API dependency with `go mod tidy` .
In a separate terminal window, start a local Consul server.
```shell
consul agent -dev -node machine
```
Run the example.
```shell
go run .
```
You should get the following result printed to the terminal.
```shell
KV: REDIS_MAXCLIENTS 1000
```
After running the code, you can also view the values in the Consul UI on your local machine at http://localhost:8500/ui/dc1/kv
