# Consul [](https://travis-ci.org/hashicorp/consul) [](https://gitter.im/hashicorp-consul/Lobby?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_campaign=pr-badge&utm_content=badge)
* Website: https://www.consul.io
* Chat: [Gitter ](https://gitter.im/hashicorp-consul/Lobby )
* Mailing list: [Google Groups ](https://groups.google.com/group/consul-tool/ )
Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is
distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
Consul provides several key features:
* **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.
* **Key/Value Storage** - A flexible key/value store enables storing
dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and
more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.
* **Multi-Datacenter** - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can
support any number of regions without complex configuration.
Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows.
## Quick Start
An extensive quick start is viewable on the Consul website:
https://www.consul.io/intro/getting-started/install.html
## Documentation
Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Consul website:
https://www.consul.io/docs
## Developing Consul
If you wish to work on Consul itself, you'll first need [Go ](https://golang.org )
installed (version 1.9+ is _required_ ). Make sure you have Go properly installed,
including setting up your [GOPATH ](https://golang.org/doc/code.html#GOPATH ).
Next, clone this repository into `$GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp/consul` and
then just type `make` . In a few moments, you'll have a working `consul` executable:
```
$ make
...
$ bin/consul
...
```
*Note: `make` will build all os/architecture combinations. Set the environment variable `CONSUL_DEV=1` to build it just for your local machine's os/architecture, or use `make dev` .*
*Note: `make` will also place a copy of the binary in the first part of your `$GOPATH` .*
You can run tests by typing `make test` .
If you make any changes to the code, run `make format` in order to automatically
format the code according to Go standards.
## Vendoring
Consul currently uses [govendor ](https://github.com/kardianos/govendor ) for
vendoring and [vendorfmt ](https://github.com/magiconair/vendorfmt ) for formatting
`vendor.json` to a more merge-friendly "one line per package" format.
