In this guide, you will learn how to deploy two, joined Consul agents each running in separate Docker containers. You will also register a service and perform basic maintenance operations. The two Consul agents will form a small datacenter.
!> Security Warning This guide is not for production use. Please refer to the [Consul Reference Architecture](https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/datacenter-deploy/reference-architecture) for Consul best practices and the [Docker Documentation](https://docs.docker.com/) for Docker best practices.
## Prerequisites
### Docker
You will need a local install of Docker running on your machine for this guide. You can find the instructions for installing Docker on your specific operating system [here](https://docs.docker.com/install/).
If you would like to interact with your containerized Consul agents using a local install of Consul, follow the instructions [here](/docs/install) and install the binary somewhere on your PATH.
consul agent -server -ui -node=server-1 -bootstrap-expect=1 -client=0.0.0.0
```
Since you started the container in detached mode, `-d`, the process will run in the background. You also set port mapping to your local machine as well as binding the client interface of our agent to 0.0.0.0. This allows you to work directly with the Consul datacenter from your local machine and to access Consul's UI and DNS over localhost. Finally, you are using Docker's default bridge network.
Note, the Consul Docker image sets up the Consul configuration directory at `/consul/config` by default. The agent will load any configuration files placed in that directory.
~> The configuration directory is **not** exposed as a volume and will not persist data. Consul uses it only during startup and does not store any state there.
To avoid mounting volumes or copying files to the container you can also save [configuration JSON](/docs/agent/options#configuration-files) to that directory via the environment variable `CONSUL_LOCAL_CONFIG`.
Next, deploy a containerized Consul client and instruct it to join the server by giving it the server's IP address. Do not use detached mode, so you can reference the client logs during later steps.
Start a service in a third container and register it with the Consul client. The basic service increments a number every time it is accessed and returns that number.
Pull the container and run it with port forwarding so that you can access it from your web browser by visiting [http://localhost:9001](http://localhost:9001).
Next, you will register the counting service with the Consul client by adding a service definition file called `counting.json` in the directory `consul/config`.
If you go back to the terminal window where you started the client, you should see logs showing that the Consul client received the hangup signal, reloaded its configuration, and synced the counting service.
If you have a local Consul binary in your PATH you can also export the `CONSUL_HTTP_ADDR` environment variable to point to the HTTP address of a remote Consul server. This will allow you to bypass `docker exec <container_id> consul <command>` and use `consul <command>` directly.
In this guide, you are binding your containerized Consul server's client address to 0.0.0.0 which allows us to communicate with our Consul datacenter with a local Consul install. By default, the client address is bound to localhost.
As long as there are enough servers in the datacenter to maintain [quorum](/docs/internals/consensus#deployment-table), Consul's [autopilot](/docs/guides/autopilot) feature will handle removing servers whose containers were stopped. Autopilot's default settings are already configured correctly. If you override them, make sure that the following [settings](/docs/agent/options#autopilot) are appropriate.
- `cleanup_dead_servers` must be set to true to make sure that a stopped container is removed from the datacenter.
- `last_contact_threshold` should be reasonably small, so that dead servers are removed quickly.
- `server_stabilization_time` should be sufficiently large (on the order of several seconds) so that unstable servers are not added to the datacenter until they stabilize.
When a previously stopped server container is restarted using `docker start <container_id>`, and it is configured to obtain a new IP, autopilot will add it back to the set of Raft peers with the same node-id and the new IP address, after which it can participate as a server again.
$ docker exec <container_id> consul snapshot save backup.snap
```
This will leave the `backup.snap` snapshot file inside of your container. If you are not saving your snapshot to a [persistent volume](https://docs.docker.com/storage/volumes/) then you will need to use `docker cp` to move your snapshot to a location outside of your container.
Users running the Consul Enterprise Docker containers can run the [consul snapshot agent](/docs/commands/snapshot/agent) to save backups automatically. Consul Enterprise's snapshot agent also allows you to save snapshots to Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage.
Setting `CONSUL_CLIENT_INTERFACE` or `CONSUL_BIND_INTERFACE` on `docker run` is equivalent to passing in the `-client` flag(documented [here](/docs/agent/options#_client)) or `-bind` flag(documented [here](/docs/agent/options#_bind)) to Consul on startup.
Setting the `CONSUL_ALLOW_PRIVILEGED_PORTS` runs setcap on the Consul binary, allowing it to bind to privileged ports. Note that not all Docker storage backends support this feature (notably AUFS).
$ docker run -d --net=host -e 'CONSUL_ALLOW_PRIVILEGED_PORTS=' consul -dns-port=53 -recursor=8.8.8.8
```
## Summary
In this guide you learned to deploy a containerized Consul datacenter. You also learned how to deploy a containerized service and how to configure your Consul client to register that service with your Consul datacenter.
You can continue learning how to deploy a Consul datacenter in production by completing the [Day 1 track](/consul/datacenter-deploy/day1-deploy-intro). The track includes securing the datacenter with Access Control Lists and encryption, DNS configuration, and datacenter federation.
For additional reference documentation on the official Docker image for Consul, refer to the following websites:
