Oracle Linux - installing Consul as server

Consul, developed by hashicorp,  is a solution for service discovery and configuration. Consul is completely distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters. Some concrete problems Consul solves: finding the services applications need (database, queue, mail server, etc.), configuring services with key/value information such as enabling maintenance mode for a web application, and health checking services so that unhealthy services aren't used. These are just a handful of important problems Consul addresses.

Consul solves the problem of service discovery and configuration. Built on top of a foundation of rigorous academic research, Consul keeps your data safe and works with the largest of infrastructures. Consul embraces modern practices and is friendly to existing DevOps tooling. Consul is already deployed in very large infrastructures across multiple datacenters and has been running in production for several months. We're excited to share it publicly.

Installing Consul on Oracle Linux is relative easy. You can download Consul from the consul.io website and unpack it. After this you already have a directly working Consul deployment. In essence it is not requiring an installation to be able to function. However, to ensure you can use consul in a production system and it starts as a service you will have to do some more things.

First, make sure your consul binary is in a good location where it is accessible for everyone. For example you can decide to move it to /usr/bin where it is widely accessible throughout the system.

Next we have to make sure we can start it relatively easy. You can start consul with all configuration as command line options however you can also put all configuration in a JSON file which makes a lot more sense. The below example is the content of a file /etc/consul.d/consul.json which I created on my test server to make consul work with a configuration file. The data_dir specified is not the best location to store persistent data so you might want to select a different data_dir location for that.

{
  "datacenter": "private_dc",
  "data_dir": "/tmp/consul3",
  "log_level": "INFO",
  "node_name": "consul_0",
  "server": true,
  "bind_addr": "127.0.0.1",
  "bootstrap_expect": 1
}

Now we have ensure the configuration is located in /etc/consul.d/consul.json we would like to ensure that consul is starting the consul server as a service every time the machine boots. I used the below code as the init script in /etc/init.d

#!/bin/sh
#
# consul - this script manages the consul agent
#
# chkconfig:   345 95 05
# processname: consul

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:       consul
# Required-Start: $local_fs $network
# Required-Stop:  $local_fs $network
# Default-Start: 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:  0 1 2 6
# Short-Description: Manage the consul agent
### END INIT INFO

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.
. /etc/sysconfig/network

# Check that networking is up.
[ "$NETWORKING" = "no" ] && exit 0

exec="/usr/bin/consul"
prog=${exec##*/}

lockfile="/var/lock/subsys/$prog"
pidfile="/var/run/${prog}.pid"
logfile="/var/log/${prog}.log"
sysconfig="/etc/sysconfig/$prog"
confdir="/etc/${prog}.d"

[ -f $sysconfig ] && . $sysconfig

export GOMAXPROCS=${GOMAXPROCS:-2}

start() {
    [ -x $exec ] || exit 5
    [ -d $confdir ] || exit 6

    echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
    touch $logfile $pidfile
    daemon "{ $exec agent $OPTIONS -config-dir=$confdir &>> $logfile & }; echo \$! >| $pidfile"

    RETVAL=$?
    [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch $lockfile
    echo
    return $RETVAL
}

stop() {
    echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
    killproc -p $pidfile $exec -INT 2&& $logfile
    RETVAL=$?
    [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f $pidfile $lockfile
    echo
    return $RETVAL
}

restart() {
    stop
    while :
    do
        ss -pl | fgrep "((\"$prog\"," > /dev/null
        [ $? -ne 0 ] && break
        sleep 0.1
    done
    start
}

reload() {
    echo -n $"Reloading $prog: "
    killproc -p $pidfile $exec -HUP
    echo
}

force_reload() {
    restart
}

configtest() {
    $exec configtest -config-dir=$confdir
}

rh_status() {
    status $prog
}

rh_status_q() {
    rh_status >/dev/null 2>&1
}

case "$1" in
    start)
        rh_status_q && exit 0
        $1
        ;;
    stop)
        rh_status_q || exit 0
        $1
        ;;
    restart)
        $1
        ;;
    reload|force-reload)
        rh_status_q || exit 7
        $1
        ;;
    status)
        rh_status
        ;;
    condrestart|try-restart)
        rh_status_q || exit 7
        restart
        ;;
    configtest)
        $1
        ;;
    *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart|condrestart|try-restart|reload|force-reload|configtest}"
        exit 2
esac

exit $?

As soon as you have the above code in the /etc/init.d/consul file and make sure this file is executable you can use chkconfig to add it as a system service and it will ensure consul is stopped and started in the right way whenever you stop or start your server. This makes your consul server a lot more resilient and you do not have to undertake any manual actions when you restart your Oracle Linux machine.

You are able to find the latest version of the script and the configuration file on my github repository. This is tested on Oracle Linux 6. It will most likely also work on other Linux distributions however it is not tested.