# Consul

* Website: http://www.consul.io
* IRC: `#consul` on Freenode
* Mailing list: [Google Groups](https://groups.google.com/group/consul-tool/)

Consul is a tool for managing and coordinating infrastructure. To do that
it provides several key features:

* Service Discovery - Services can register themselves and to easily
  discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface.

* 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 Store - 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 on Linux however.

## Quick Start

First, [download a pre-built Consul binary](http://www.consul.io/downloads.html)
for your operating system or [compile Consul yourself](#developing-consul).

An extensive quick quick start is viewable on the Consul website:

http://www.consul.io/intro/getting-started/

## Documentation

Full, comprehensive documentation is viewable on the Consul website:

http://www.consul.io/docs

## Developing Consul

If you wish to work on Consul itself, you'll first need [Go](http://golang.org)
installed (version 1.2+ is _required_). Make sure you have Go properly installed,
including setting up your [GOPATH](http://golang.org/doc/code.html#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.