To activate Consul Service Discovery use the starter with group org.springframework.cloud and artifact id spring-cloud-starter-consul-discovery. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

When a client registers with Consul, it provides meta-data about itself such as host and port, id, name and tags. An HTTP Check is created by default that Consul hits the /health endpoint every 10 seconds. If the health check fails, the service instance is marked as critical.

Example Consul client:

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello world";
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

(i.e. utterly normal Spring Boot app). If the Consul client is located somewhere other than localhost:8500, the configuration is required to locate the client. Example:

application.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      host: localhost
      port: 8500

	Caution
	If you use Spring Cloud Consul Config, the above values will need to be placed in bootstrap.yml instead of application.yml.

The default service name, instance id and port, taken from the Environment, are ${spring.application.name}, the Spring Context ID and ${server.port} respectively.

To disable the Consul Discovery Client you can set spring.cloud.consul.discovery.enabled to false.

To disable the service registration you can set spring.cloud.consul.discovery.register to false.

The health check for a Consul instance defaults to "/health", which is the default locations of a useful endpoint in a Spring Boot Actuator application. You need to change these, even for an Actuator application if you use a non-default context path or servlet path (e.g. server.servletPath=/foo) or management endpoint path (e.g. management.context-path=/admin). The interval that Consul uses to check the health endpoint may also be configured. "10s" and "1m" represent 10 seconds and 1 minute respectively. Example:

application.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        healthCheckPath: ${management.context-path}/health
        healthCheckInterval: 15s

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        tags: foo=bar, baz

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        instanceId: ${spring.application.name}:${vcap.application.instance_id:${spring.application.instance_id:${random.value}}}

To get started with Consul Configuration use the starter with group org.springframework.cloud and artifact id spring-cloud-starter-consul-config. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

This will enable auto-configuration that will setup Spring Cloud Consul Config.

Consul Config may be customized using the following properties:

bootstrap.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        enabled: true
        prefix: configuration
        defaultContext: apps
        profileSeparator: '::'

The Consul Config Watch takes advantage of the ability of consul to watch a key prefix. The Config Watch makes a blocking Consul HTTP API call to determine if any relevant configuration data has changed for the current application. If there is new configuration data a Refresh Event is published. This is equivalent to calling the /refresh actuator endpoint.

To change the frequency of when the Config Watch is called change spring.cloud.consul.config.watch.delay. The default value is 1000, which is in milliseconds.

To disable the Config Watch set spring.cloud.consul.config.watch.enabled=false.

It may be more convenient to store a blob of properties in YAML or Properties format as opposed to individual key/value pairs. Set the spring.cloud.consul.config.format property to YAML or PROPERTIES. For example to use YAML:

bootstrap.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        format: YAML

YAML must be set in the appropriate data key in consul. Using the defaults above the keys would look like:

config/testApp,dev/data
config/testApp/data
config/application,dev/data
config/application/data

You could store a YAML document in any of the keys listed above.

You can change the data key using spring.cloud.consul.config.data-key.

git2consul is a Consul community project that loads files from a git repository to individual keys into Consul. By default the names of the keys are names of the files. YAML and Properties files are supported with file extensions of .yml and .properties respectively. Set the spring.cloud.consul.config.format property to FILES. For example:

bootstrap.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        format: FILES

Given the following keys in /config, the development profile and an application name of foo:

.gitignore
application.yml
bar.properties
foo-development.properties
foo-production.yml
foo.properties
master.ref

the following property sources would be created:

config/foo-development.properties
config/foo.properties
config/application.yml

The value of each key needs to be a properly formatted YAML or Properties file.

It may be convenient in certain circumstances (like local development or certain test scenarios) to not fail if consul isn’t available for configuration. Setting spring.cloud.consul.config.failFast=false in bootstrap.yml will cause the configuration module to log a warning rather than throw an exception. This will allow the application to continue startup normally.

To get started with the Consul Bus use the starter with group org.springframework.cloud and artifact id spring-cloud-starter-consul-bus. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

See the Spring Cloud Bus documentation for the available actuator endpoints and howto send custom messages.