Consul

• Website: http://www.consul.io
• IRC: #consul on Freenode
• Mailing list: Google Groups

Consul is a tool for managing and coordinating infrastructure. To do that it provides several key features:

• Service Discovery - Services can register themselves and to easily discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface.

• 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 Store - 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, and Windows. It is recommended to run the Consul servers on Linux however.

Quick Start

First, download a pre-built Consul binary for your operating system or compile Consul yourself.

An extensive quick quick start is viewable on the Consul website:

http://www.consul.io/intro/getting-started/install.html

Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Consul website:

http://www.consul.io/docs

Developing Consul

If you wish to work on Consul itself, you'll first need Go installed (version 1.2+ 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 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.