Consul is a service networking solution to automate network configurations, discover services, and enable secure connectivity across any cloud or runtime.

Features

Service Discovery: Automatically discover and register services
Health Checking: Monitor service health and availability
Key/Value Store: Store configuration data
Multi-Datacenter: Support for multiple datacenters
Service Mesh: Secure service-to-service communication

Quick Start

Start Consul server:

docker compose up -d

Configuration

Environment Variables

CONSUL_VERSION: Consul version (default: 1.20.3)
CONSUL_HTTP_PORT_OVERRIDE: HTTP API port (default: 8500)
CONSUL_DNS_PORT_OVERRIDE: DNS query port (default: 8600)
CONSUL_SERF_LAN_PORT_OVERRIDE: Serf LAN port (default: 8301)
CONSUL_SERF_WAN_PORT_OVERRIDE: Serf WAN port (default: 8302)
CONSUL_SERVER_RPC_PORT_OVERRIDE: Server RPC port (default: 8300)
CONSUL_BIND_INTERFACE: Network interface to bind (default: eth0)
CONSUL_CLIENT_INTERFACE: Client network interface (default: eth0)

Access

Web UI: http://localhost:8500
HTTP API: http://localhost:8500/v1
DNS Query: localhost:8600

Default Configuration

The default configuration runs Consul in server mode with:

Single node (bootstrap mode)
Web UI enabled
Log level: INFO
Datacenter: dc1

Custom Configuration

Uncomment the configuration volume in docker-compose.yaml and create consul.json:

{
  "datacenter": "dc1",
  "server": true,
  "ui_config": {
    "enabled": true
  },
  "bootstrap_expect": 1,
  "log_level": "INFO"
}

Health Check

Check Consul cluster members:

docker compose exec consul consul members

Resources

Resource Limits: 1 CPU, 512MB RAM
Resource Reservations: 0.25 CPU, 128MB RAM