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[](LICENSE)
[](https://hub.docker.com/r/hashicorp/consul)
[](https://goreportcard.com/report/github.com/hashicorp/consul)
Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.
* Website: https://www.consul.io
* Tutorials: [HashiCorp Learn ](https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul )
* Forum: [Discuss ](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul )
Consul provides several key features:
* **Multi-Datacenter** - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can
support any number of regions without complex configuration.
* **Service Mesh** - Consul Service Mesh enables secure service-to-service
communication with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization. Applications
can use sidecar proxies in a service mesh configuration to establish TLS
connections for inbound and outbound connections with Transparent Proxy.
* **Service Discovery** - Consul makes it simple for services to register
themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface.
External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
* **Health Checking** - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert
operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service
discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service
level circuit breakers.
* **Dynamic App Configuration** - An HTTP API that allows users to store indexed objects, like configuration parameters and application metadata, within Consul.
Consul runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows and includes an
optional [browser based UI ](https://demo.consul.io ). A commercial version
called [Consul Enterprise ](https://www.consul.io/docs/enterprise ) is also
available.
**Please note**: We take Consul's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you
believe you have found a security issue in Consul, please [responsibly disclose ](https://www.hashicorp.com/security#vulnerability-reporting )
by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.
## Quick Start
A few quick start guides are available on the Consul website:
* **Standalone binary install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/consul/get-started-vms
* **Minikube install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-minikube
* **Kind install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-kind
* **Kubernetes install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/kubernetes-deployment-guide
* **Deploy HCP Consul:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/consul/hcp-gs-deploy
## Documentation
Full, comprehensive documentation is available on the Consul website: https://consul.io/docs
## Contributing
Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please refer to [CONTRIBUTING.md ](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md )
for guidance. For contributions specifically to the browser based UI, please
refer to the UI's [README.md ](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/main/ui/packages/consul-ui/README.md )
for guidance.
