Consul

Setup

Prerequisites

You'll need virtualbox, vagrant and ansible setup on you local to use this project

On MacOS you can install them via Homebrew and Homebrew Cask

brew cask install virtualbox vagrant

and

brew install ansible

Then we will need some vagrant plugin and setup on your local machine to mimic cloud providers.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater

Will add/remove a host in /etc/hosts each time you boot up or destroy a VM.

This will ask for your sudo password. DON'T PANIC.

Add the following configuration into ~/.ssh/config

Host 10.0.100.* *.consulcluster.dev
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
  User root
  LogLevel ERROR

We will use .consulcluster.dev to access our VMs. VMs will get an ip in [10.0.100.0,10.0.100.255] range

Launch

Simply run

vagrant up

This will boot up some VMs in Virtualbox and upload your public SSH key to it (like it would happen on Digital Ocean for instance)

Consul UI

Consul UI is set up on each node. However, consul UI works only on localhost by default. To access it from you vagrant host, you can create a small SSH tunnel with with the following command

vagrant ssh node1 -- -L 8543:127.0.0.1:8500

You can then access consul UI from your host browser via

http://localhost:8543

Provision

Use ansible to provision your freshly booted VMs

ansible-playbook -i provisioning/inventory provisioning/playbook.yml

Resources

• 6 practices for super smooth Ansible experience