HashiCorp Consul

Detailed information on the HashiCorp Consul state store component

Setup a HashiCorp Consul state store

• Self-Hosted
• Kubernetes

You can run Consul locally using Docker:

docker run -d --name=dev-consul -e CONSUL_BIND_INTERFACE=eth0 consul

You can then interact with the server using localhost:8500.

The easiest way to install Consul on Kubernetes is by using the Helm chart:

helm install consul stable/consul

This will install Consul into the default namespace. To interact with Consul, find the service with: kubectl get svc consul.

For example, if installing using the example above, the Consul host address would be:

consul.default.svc.cluster.local:8500

Create a Dapr component

The next step is to create a Dapr component for Consul.

Create the following YAML file named consul.yaml:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: <NAME>
  namespace: <NAMESPACE>
spec:
  type: state.consul
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: datacenter
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-DATA-CENTER> # Required. Example: dc1
  - name: httpAddr
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-CONSUL-HTTP-ADDRESS> # Required. Example: "consul.default.svc.cluster.local:8500"
  - name: aclToken
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-ACL-TOKEN> # Optional. default: ""
  - name: scheme
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-SCHEME> # Optional. default: "http"
  - name: keyPrefixPath
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-TABLE> # Optional. default: ""

Warning

The above example uses secrets as plain strings. It is recommended to use a secret store for the secrets as described here.

Example

The following example uses the Kubernetes secret store to retrieve the acl token:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: <NAME>
  namespace: <NAMESPACE>
spec:
  type: state.consul
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: datacenter
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-DATACENTER>
  - name: httpAddr
    value: <REPLACE-WITH-HTTP-ADDRESS>
  - name: aclToken
    secretKeyRef:
      name: <KUBERNETES-SECRET-NAME>
      key: <KUBERNETES-SECRET-KEY>
  ...

Apply the configuration

In Kubernetes

To apply the Consul state store to Kubernetes, use the kubectl CLI:

kubectl apply -f consul.yaml

Running locally

To run locally, create a components dir containing the YAML file and provide the path to the dapr run command with the flag --components-path.

Last modified February 16, 2021: Merge pull request #1235 from dapr/update-v0.11 (b4e9fbb)