Consul

• Website: https://www.consul.io
• IRC: #consul on Freenode
• 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.

Consul runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is recommended to run the Consul servers only on Linux, however.

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 1.6+ 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.

Building Consul on Windows

Make sure Go 1.6+ is installed on your system and that the Go command is in your %PATH%.

For building Consul on Windows, you also need to have MinGW installed. TDM-GCC is a simple bundle installer which has all the required tools for building Consul with MinGW.

Install TDM-GCC and make sure it has been added to your %PATH%.

If all goes well, you should be able to build Consul by running make.bat from a command prompt.

See also golang/winstrap and golang/wiki/WindowsBuild for more information of how to set up a general Go build environment on Windows with MinGW.

Vendoring

Consul currently uses Godep for vendoring. These steps can be used to update dependencies in a controlled way.

Start by running a clean golang container:

docker run -i -t -v `pwd`:/go/src/github.com/hashicorp/consul golang sh

After that, you'll get a shell inside the container:

1. Run go get github.com/tools/godep to install Godep.
2. Run cd /go/src/github.com/hashicorp/consul to change to the Consul repo. Note that we mounted that as a volume above into the GOPATH.
3. Run godep restore to update the container with the current state of dependencies based on what's vendored.
4. Update dependencies as needed.
5. Run godep save and look at the results carefully before committing.