open-consul/website/source/intro/getting-started/install.html.markdown

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
intro	Installing Consul	gettingstarted-install	Consul must first be installed on every node that will be a member of the Consul cluster. To make installation easy, Consul is distributed as a binary package for all supported platforms and architectures. This page will not cover how to compile Consul from source.

Install Consul

Consul must first be installed on every node that will be a member of the Consul cluster. To make installation easy, Consul is distributed as a binary package for all supported platforms and architectures. This page will not cover how to compile Consul from source.

Installing Consul

To install Consul, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Consul is packaged as a "zip" archive.

After downloading Consul, unzip the package. Copy the consul binary to somewhere on the PATH so that it can be executed. On Unix systems, ~/bin and /usr/local/bin are common installation directories, depending on if you want to restrict the install to a single user or expose it to the entire system. On Windows systems, you can put it wherever you would like, as long as that location is on the %PATH%.

OS X

If you are using homebrew as a package manager, you can install consul with:

$ brew cask install consul

if you are missing the cask plugin, you can install it with:

$ brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask

Verifying the Installation

After installing Consul, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking that consul is available. By executing consul you should see help output similar to this:

$ consul
usage: consul [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    agent          Runs a Consul agent
    event          Fire a new event
    exec           Executes a command on Consul nodes
    force-leave    Forces a member of the cluster to enter the "left" state
    info           Provides debugging information for operators
    join           Tell Consul agent to join cluster
    keygen         Generates a new encryption key
    leave          Gracefully leaves the Consul cluster and shuts down
    members        Lists the members of a Consul cluster
    monitor        Stream logs from a Consul agent
    reload         Triggers the agent to reload configuration files
    version        Prints the Consul version
    watch          Watch for changes in Consul

If you get an error that consul could not be found, your PATH environment variable was not set up properly. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Consul was installed.

Next Steps

Consul is installed and ready for operation. Let's run the agent!