Consul

• Website: https://www.consul.io
• Chat: Gitter
• Mailing list: Google Groups

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.

• Service Segmentation - Consul Connect enables secure service-to-service communication with automatic TLS encryption and identity-based authorization.

Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows. A commercial version called Consul Enterprise is also available.

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 installed (version 1.9+ is required). Make sure you have Go properly installed, including setting up your 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. The test suite may fail if over-parallelized, so if you are seeing stochastic failures try GOTEST_FLAGS="-p 2 -parallel 2" 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 for vendoring and vendorfmt for formatting vendor.json to a more merge-friendly "one line per package" format.