HashiCorp Consul 1.1

We are excited to announce the release of HashiCorp Consul 1.1. Consul is a tool for service discovery and runtime configuration for distributed applications and infrastructure.

Over the past few months, our team has been working on refreshing our web UI to be consistent with other HashiCorp products. Consul’s 1.1 release introduces the new modern web UI developed using design driven principles, including extensive user testing, to provide a more consistent user experience. You can read more about the redesign on our design team’s blog post here.

»New Web UI Beta

We have redesigned the web UI for Consul and are running a beta program to ensure we collect feedback from users prior to making it the default. You can view the following image or a live demo at demo.consul.io.

The new UI can be used with Consul 1.1.0. Setting the CONSUL_UI_BETA environment variable to 1 or true will replace the existing UI with the new one. Without this environment variable, the web UI will default to the old version. If the environment variable is set, it will only run the new version of the UI on the configured HTTP port (defaults to 8500).

For example, to run an agent in development mode with the new UI enabled:

CONSUL_UI_BETA=true consul agent -dev
...

This environment variable can be set wherever you execute Consul with the -ui flag. If issues are encountered while testing the new UI, please open a Github issue with your feedback, including screenshots as appropriate. We’ve created a custom issue template for issues specific to the web UI.

»Background on the Redesign

The Consul Web UI has served its users well but has been due for an update. It now improves on existing functionality by adopting a modern design language. The goal of this redesign is to provide easy to use and intuitive user experience to increase the adoption of the Consul UI and empower our users. Our design team details their process for this redesign on their design blog.

»Other Enhancements

In addition to the new UI, this release also delivers new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Some of the major features include:

• Prometheus support for telemetry. Consul telemetry now supports Prometheus via the existing /v1/agent/metrics endpoint using the query param ?format=prometheus. Learn more in the telemetry documentation..
• Automatic bootstrapping (via retry-join) for the Triton Cloud. Users of Triton can automatically bootstrap their clusters by setting a tag on their machines and utilizing the retry-join functionality to discover the IPs of other Consul agents.
• The removal of APIs deprecated in 1.0. Multiple configuration keys, CLI commands, and telemetry keys were removed after being deprecated in 1.0. Notably, the backwards compatibility option to prefix metrics with consul.consul no longer exists. Read more in the upgrade guide for 1.1.0.
• Licensing integration (Consul Enterprise Only). We’ve integrated a licensing system to enable self-serve trials and easy licensing of Consul Enterprise. All current delivery methods will be maintained, and licensing will be rolled out in the future for our existing customers. Once live, we’ll post a link to access a self-serve download of Consul Enterprise from the Enterprise section of the documentation.

»Conclusion

Please review the v1.1.0 changelog for a detailed list of changes. Note that previously deprecated fields and configuration options were removed in this release. Read the 1.1.0 upgrade guide for more information.

As always, please test in an isolated environment before upgrading. Consul 1.1.0 is also available in Consul Enterprise Pro and Consul Enterprise Premium.

A special thank you to our active community members who have been invaluable in adding new features, reporting bugs, and improving the documentation for Consul.