open-consul/website/source/docs/agent/services.html.markdown

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docs	Service Definition	docs-agent-services

Services

One of the main goals of service discovery is to provide a catalog of available services. To that end, the agent provides a simple service definition format to declare the availability of a service, and to potentially associate it with a health check. A health check is considered to be application level if it associated with a service. A service is defined in a configuration file, or added at runtime over the HTTP interface.

Service Definition

A service definition that is a script looks like:

{
    "service": {
        "name": "redis",
        "tags": ["master"],
        "port": 8000,
        "check": {
            "script": "/usr/local/bin/check_redis.py",
            "interval": "10s"
        }
    }
}

A service definition must include a name, and may optionally provide an id, tags, port, and check. The id is set to the name if not provided. It is required that all services have a unique ID, so if names might conflict, then unique ID's should be provided.

The tags is a list of opaque value to Consul, but can be used to distinguish between "master" or "slave" nodes, different versions, or any other service level labels. The port can be used as well to make a service oriented architecture simpler to configure. This way the address and port of a service can be discovered.

Lastly, a service can have an associated health check. This is a powerful feature as it allows a web balancer to gracefully remove failing nodes, or a database to replace a failed slave, etc. The health check is strongly integrated in the DNS interface as well. If a service is failing it's health check or a node has any failing system-level check, the DNS interface will omit that node from any service query.

There is more information about checks here. The check must be of the script or TTL type. If it is a script type, script and interval must be provided. If it is a TTL type, then only ttl must be provided. The check name is automatically generated as "service:".

To configure a service, either provide it as a -config-file option to the agent, or place it inside the -config-dir of the agent. The file must end in the ".json" extension to be loaded by Consul. Check definitions can also be updated by sending a SIGHUP to the agent. Alternatively, the service can be registered dynamically using the HTTP API.