HTTP Health Check

The health check for a Consul instance defaults to "/health", which is the default locations of a useful endpoint in a Spring Boot Actuator application. You need to change these, even for an Actuator application if you use a non-default context path or servlet path (e.g. server.servletPath=/foo) or management endpoint path (e.g. management.server.servlet.context-path=/admin). The interval that Consul uses to check the health endpoint may also be configured. "10s" and "1m" represent 10 seconds and 1 minute respectively. Example:

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        healthCheckPath: ${management.server.servlet.context-path}/health
        healthCheckInterval: 15s

You can disable the health check by setting management.health.consul.enabled=false.

Metadata and Consul 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.

Making the Consul Instance ID Unique

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.

Applying Headers to Health Check Requests

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"