Consul-Demo

A little taste of Consul for configuration management.

Why

• You need help managing configuration settings
• You want different settings across your environments
• You need to change your configuration as your environment changes
• You don't want to manage env-specific values with your source code

What

• Consul: Service Discovery and configuration made easy.
• Key/Value Store, Service Registry, Change Notification, DNS Service
• You can use without going "all-in".
• No docker required (but docker friendly).

How? - Basic Config

• Use environment variables! Read about them via the 12-factor app
• Consul offers key/value store
• Use envconsul to set env vars for a process
• Monitors consul, refreshes process

How? - File Templating

• consul-template lets you write config files (similar to confd)
• Monitors consul, writes new file
• Optionally will trigger a command, like reloading HAProxy

Docker Friendly

• Registrator automatically scans the docker
  daemon and registered services (also works with etcd)
• Progrium/docker-consul packages consul in a container, with ui.
• Provides a backend for Swarm Discovery (along with etcd/zookeeper).

Explore This Repo

• An Ubuntu 14.04 Vagrantfile, with a shell provisioner for installing consul and friends
• start-consul-standalone, a helper script to start a standalone server (no clustering required)
• envconsul sample scripts, including a simple python web app
• consul-template sample scripts for an haproxy config file, with health checks