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Consul Commands (CLI)

Consul is controlled via a very easy to use command-line interface (CLI). Consul is only a single command-line application: consul. This application then takes a subcommand such as "agent" or "members". The complete list of subcommands is in the navigation to the left.

The Consul CLI is a well-behaved command line application. In erroneous cases, a non-zero exit status will be returned. It also responds to -h and --help as you'd most likely expect. And some commands that expect input accept "-" as a parameter to tell Consul to read the input from stdin.

To view a list of the available commands at any time, just run consul with no arguments:

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

Available commands are:
    agent          Runs a Consul agent
    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

To get help for any specific command, pass the -h flag to the relevant subcommand. For example, to see help about the join subcommand:

$ consul join -h
Usage: consul join [options] address ...

  Tells a running Consul agent (with "consul agent") to join the cluster
  by specifying at least one existing member.

Options:

  -rpc-addr=127.0.0.1:8400  RPC address of the Consul agent.
  -wan                      Joins a server to another server in the WAN pool