# Consul [![CircleCI](https://circleci.com/gh/hashicorp/consul/tree/master.svg?style=svg)](https://circleci.com/gh/hashicorp/consul/tree/master) [![Discuss](https://img.shields.io/badge/discuss-consul-ca2171.svg?style=flat)](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul)

* Website: https://www.consul.io
* Tutorials: [HashiCorp Learn](https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul)
* Forum: [Discuss](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul)

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.

* **Service Segmentation/Service Mesh** - Consul Connect 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 without being aware of Connect at all. 

* **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. A commercial
version called [Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul)
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/consul/getting-started/install
* **Minikube install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/minikube
* **Kubernetes install:** https://learn.hashicorp.com/consul/kubernetes/kubernetes-deployment-guide

## Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is available on the Consul website:

https://www.consul.io/docs

## Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please refer to [CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) for guidance.