Consul is a tool for service discovery, configuration, monitoring, and orchestration. TryConsul will help you spin up a cluster of Consul servers so you can see how it works. You will receive:
- Consul cluster
- Consul web UI
- Three VMs to play with
This project is part of TryDB.io.
Before you start, you'll need Vagrant installed and git installed. TryConsul will work with VirtualBox or VMware (with the VMware plugin for Vagrant). Once this is setup, simply:
$ git clone https://github.com/trydb/tryconsul
$ cd tryconsul
$ vagrant up
Vagrant will download the boxes, provision them, and install consul.
Consul will start automatically when you boot the instances, and should form a cluster automatically. You can see the command orchestration in the Vagrantfile.
$ vagrant ssh consul1
> Now inside VM
$ consul members
Node Address Status Type Build Protocol
consul1 10.7.0.5:8301 alive server 0.6.0 2
consul2 10.7.0.6:8301 alive server 0.6.0 2
consul3 10.7.0.7:8301 alive server 0.6.0 2
You can replace consul1 with consul2 or consul3 to login to those respective VMs.
Try some other commands:
$ consul exec ifconfig
You can also view the consul web UI by hitting one of the nodes on port :8500. You can see your IPs via consul members (your IPs may be different).
Select any of your IPs and open it in your browser: http://10.7.0.5:8500/ui
Consul has a comprehensive featureset for building distributed systems, including monitoring, configuration, mutexes, and more.
- Run commands across your cluster
- Put some data in the key-value store
- Try adding a service
- Try adding a healtcheck
- Configure security options like encryption or ACLs
Learn about more features in the Consul documentation.
When you're done, you can shut down the cluster using
$ vagrant halt
And free up some disk space using
$ vagrant destroy -f
If you want to change consul configuration, run
$ vagrant provision
If you run into problems, you can see consul's logs via:
$ consul monitor
or
$ tail /var/log/syslog
or
$ sudo tail -f /var/log/upstart/consul.log