consul/website/source/intro/getting-started/install.html.md

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intro Installing Consul gettingstarted-install Consul must first be installed on every node that will be a member of the Consul cluster. To make installation easy, Consul is distributed as a binary package for all supported platforms and architectures. This page will not cover how to compile Consul from source.

Install Consul

Consul must first be installed on your machine. Consul is distributed as a binary package for all supported platforms and architectures. This page will not cover how to compile Consul from source, but compiling from source is covered in the documentation for those who want to be sure they're compiling source they trust into the final binary.

Installing Consul

To install Consul, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Consul is packaged as a zip archive.

After downloading Consul, unzip the package. Consul runs as a single binary named consul. Any other files in the package can be safely removed and Consul will still function.

The final step is to make sure that the consul binary is available on the PATH. See this page for instructions on setting the PATH on Linux and Mac. This page contains instructions for setting the PATH on Windows.

Verifying the Installation

After installing Consul, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking that consul is available. By executing consul you should see help output similar to this:

$ consul
usage: consul [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    agent          Runs a Consul agent
    event          Fire a new event

# ...

If you get an error that consul could not be found, your PATH environment variable was not set up properly. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Consul was installed.

Next Steps

Consul is installed and ready for operation. Let's run the agent!