--- layout: "intro" page_title: "Consul Connect" sidebar_current: "gettingstarted-connect" description: |- Connect is a feature of Consul that provides service-to-service connection authorization and encryption using mutual TLS. This ensures that all service communication in your datacenter is encrypted and that the rules of what services can communicate is centrally managed with Consul. --- # Connect We've now registered our first service with Consul and we've shown how you can use the HTTP API or DNS interface to query the address and directly connect to that service. Consul also provides a feature called **Connect** for automatically connecting via an encrypted TLS connection and authorizing which services are allowed to connect to each other. Applications do not need to be modified at all to use Connect. [Sidecar proxies](/docs/connect/proxies.html) can be used to automatically establish TLS connections for inbound and outbound connections without being aware of Connect at all. Applications may also [natively integrate with Connect](/docs/connect/native.html) for optimal performance and security. -> **Security note:** The getting started guide will show Connect features and focus on ease of use with a dev-mode agent. We will _not setup_ Connect in a production-recommended secure way. Please read the Connect reference documentation on security best practices to understand the tradeoffs. ~> **Windows Support**: The built-in proxy will not currently run on the Windows platform, but compatibility will be added in a future Consul release. ## Starting a Connect-unaware Service Let's begin by starting a service that is unaware of Connect all. To keep it simple, let's just use `socat` to start a basic echo service. This service will accept TCP connections and echo back any data sent to it. If `socat` isn't installed on your machine, it should be easily available via a package manager. ```sh $ socat -v tcp-l:8181,fork exec:"/bin/cat" ``` You can verify it is working by using `nc` to connect directly to it. Once connected, type some text and press enter. The text you typed should be echoed back: ``` $ nc 127.0.0.1 8181 hello hello echo echo ``` `socat` is a decades-old Unix utility and our process is configured to only accept a basic TCP connection. It has no concept of encryption, the TLS protocol, etc. This can be representative of an existing service in your datacenter such as a database, backend web service, etc. ## Registering the Service with Consul and Connect Next, let's register the service with Consul. We'll do this by writing a new service definition. This is the same as the previous step in the getting started guide, except this time we'll also configure Connect. ```sh $ cat < Consul Connect proxy starting... Configuration mode: Flags Service: web Upstream: socat => :9191 Public listener: Disabled ... ``` With that running, we can verify it works by establishing a connection: ``` $ nc 127.0.0.1 9191 hello hello ``` **The connection between proxies is now encrypted and authorized.** We're now communicating to the "socat" service via a TLS connection. The local connections to/from the proxy are unencrypted, but in production these will be loopback-only connections. Any traffic in and out of the machine is always encrypted. ## Registering a Dependent Service We previously established a connection by directly running `consul connect proxy`. Realistically, services need to establish connections to dependencies over Connect. Let's register a service "web" that registers "socat" as an upstream dependency: ```sh $ cat < **Security note:** The Connect security model requires trusting loopback connections when proxies are in use. To further secure this, tools like network namespacing may be used. ## Controlling Access with Intentions Intentions are used to define which services may communicate. Our connections above succeeded because in a development mode agent, the ACL system is "allow all" by default. Let's insert a rule to deny access from web to socat: ```sh $ consul intention create -deny web socat Created: web => socat (deny) ``` With the proxy processes running that we setup previously, connection attempts now fail: ```sh $ nc 127.0.0.1 9191 $ ``` Try deleting the intention (or updating it to allow) and attempting the connection again. Intentions allow services to be segmented via a centralized control plane (Consul). To learn more, read the reference documentation on [intentions](/docs/connect/intentions.html). Note that in the current release of Consul, changing intentions will not affect existing connections. Therefore, you must establish a new connection to see the effects of a changed intention. This will be addressed in the near term in a future version of Consul. ## Next Steps We've now configured a service on a single agent and used Connect for automatic connection authorization and encryption. This is a great feature highlight but let's explore the full value of Consul by [setting up our first cluster](/intro/getting-started/join.html)!