Installing Consul in a VM

First, we will download and install Consul on the VM and then install it in Kubernetes. To install Consul in a VM, follow these steps:

1. Visit the download site for Consul: https://www.consul.io/downloads.html.
2. To be consistent with the exercises in this book, download the v1.6.1. package for Linux AMD64:

$ wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/1.6.1/consul_1.6.1_linux_amd64.zip

Note: Consul maintains its releases at https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul, where you can pick a particular version to work with. For this book, we'll be using version 1.6.1.

3. Extract consul from the .zip archive and move it to a directory that's on PATH:

$ unzip consul_1.6.1_linux_amd64.zip
$ sudo mv consul /bin

This completes the installation.

4. Check the version of Consul that's been installed:

$ consul version
Consul v1.6.1
Protocol 2 spoken by default...