3. Service Discovery with Consul

When management server port is set to something different than the application port, by setting management.server.port property, management service will be registered as a separate service than the application service. For example:

application.yml. 

spring:
  application:
    name: myApp
management:
  server:
    port: 4452

Above configuration will register following 2 services:

ID: myApp
Name: myApp

ID: myApp-management
Name: myApp-management

Management service will inherit its instanceId and serviceName from the application service. For example:

application.yml. 

spring:
  application:
    name: myApp
management:
  server:
    port: 4452
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        instance-id: custom-service-id
        serviceName: myprefix-${spring.application.name}

Above configuration will register following 2 services:

ID: custom-service-id
Name: myprefix-myApp

ID: custom-service-id-management
Name: myprefix-myApp-management

Further customization is possible via following properties:

/** Port to register the management service under (defaults to management port) */
spring.cloud.consul.discovery.management-port

/** Suffix to use when registering management service (defaults to "management" */
spring.cloud.consul.discovery.management-suffix

/** Tags to use when registering management service (defaults to "management" */
spring.cloud.consul.discovery.management-tags

Consul does not yet support metadata on services. Spring Cloud’s ServiceInstance has a Map<String, String> metadata field. Spring Cloud Consul uses Consul tags to approximate metadata until Consul officially supports metadata. Tags with the form key=value will be split and used as a Map key and value respectively. Tags without the equal = sign, will be used as both the key and value.

application.yml. 

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

The above configuration will result in a map with foo→bar and baz→baz.

By default a consul instance is registered with an ID that is equal to its Spring Application Context ID. By default, the Spring Application Context ID is ${spring.application.name}:comma,separated,profiles:${server.port}. For most cases, this will allow multiple instances of one service to run on one machine. If further uniqueness is required, Using Spring Cloud you can override this by providing a unique identifier in spring.cloud.consul.discovery.instanceId. For example:

application.yml. 

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

With this metadata, and multiple service instances deployed on localhost, the random value will kick in there to make the instance unique. In Cloudfoundry the vcap.application.instance_id will be populated automatically in a Spring Boot application, so the random value will not be needed.

Headers can be applied to health check requests. For example, if you’re trying to register a Spring Cloud Config server that uses Vault Backend:

application.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        health-check-headers:
          X-Config-Token: 6442e58b-d1ea-182e-cfa5-cf9cddef0722

According to the HTTP standard, each header can have more than one values, in which case, an array can be supplied:

application.yml. 

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        health-check-headers:
          X-Config-Token:
            - "6442e58b-d1ea-182e-cfa5-cf9cddef0722"
            - "Some other value"

Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate for looking up services using the logical service names/ids instead of physical URLs. Both Feign and the discovery-aware RestTemplate utilize Ribbon for client-side load balancing.

If you want to access service STORES using the RestTemplate simply declare:

@LoadBalanced
@Bean
public RestTemplate loadbalancedRestTemplate() {
     new RestTemplate();
}

and use it like this (notice how we use the STORES service name/id from Consul instead of a fully qualified domainname):

@Autowired
RestTemplate restTemplate;

public String getFirstProduct() {
   return this.restTemplate.getForObject("https://STORES/products/1", String.class);
}

If you have Consul clusters in multiple datacenters and you want to access a service in another datacenter a service name/id alone is not enough. In that case you use property spring.cloud.consul.discovery.datacenters.STORES=dc-west where STORES is the service name/id and dc-west is the datacenter where the STORES service lives.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient which provides a simple API for discovery clients that is not specific to Netflix, e.g.

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = discoveryClient.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri();
    }
    return null;
}