consul-ui

consul-ui

A simple HTML5 app that displays all services within Consul with AJAX requests. It supports fitering based on tags and does not rely on Consul to display pages, meaning that it can be scaled horizontally without any troubles with Consul.

Features

• List all services details, with very fast lookups.
• consul-timeline-ui.html Let you see all changes applied to your services with history
• List all keys
• List all nodes
• List datacenters

Quick install with Docker

An Docker image is also available https://hub.docker.com/r/discoverycriteo/consul-templaterb and allows to quickly have a working Consul-UI that will server the UI to explore your Consul Cluster.

Is it prod ready?

This application is used for several months within Criteo to replace Consul native interface and is used daily by hundreds of users. At Criteo, consul-templaterb creates the static web, updates it continuously and all the static pages are served using nginx, but any web server might be used.

Criteo has more than 20k Consul nodes on 8 datacenters, so it should work for most installations.

It has far more performance than most Consul UIs, the only downside is that the whole application is Read-Only (but it would be possible to add RW support with CORS to modify values within Consul).

You can watch a video comparison of this application with the new native Consul UI interface of Consul 1.2.x, performance gap is especially strong when using remote Datacenters (in the video around 01:10) where this app displays all information from datacenter in Tokyo from Paris.

Usage

consul-templaterb -c http://localhost:8500 samples/consul-ui/*.erb

Where http://localhost:8500 is the address of the Consul agent you want to use to perform requests.

The content is statically created, so you can serve it using any HTTP server very easily.

For development, you might use python -m SimpleHTTPServer in order to server the result on your browser.

Running it in production

Whatever your solution, be sure to have a index.html, so read next below on how generating an index.html.

Running with web server

You can run it with your favoite web server, at Criteo we run it with nginx which handles nicely cache and offer good performance.

In that case, consul-templaterb can start nginx with --exec or you can run it as a daemon, in which case, consul-templaterb only generate the files.

Run it in Consul

You can run consul with -ui-dir=/path/to/directory/of/consul-ui, in such case reaching consul on poort 8500 will redirect to the /ui/ path, displaying the UI of your choice on http://consul-agent.example.org:8500/ui/.

Generating index.html

By default, the command consul-templaterb -c http://localhost:8500 samples/consul-ui/*.erb`` will generate sample/consul-ui/consul-services-ui.html file. If you want to use index.html instead you might use the --template samples/consul-ui/consul-services-ui.html:samples/consul-ui/index.html` instead. Example:

consul-templaterb -c http://localhost:8500 \
  --template samples/consul-ui/consul-services-ui.html.erb:samples/consul-ui/index.html \
  samples/consul-ui/*.erb

Will generate index.html and consul_template.json in your directory, so you might serve it directly.

Filtering services

This app supports the following environment variables:

• SERVICES_TAG_FILTER: basic tag filter for service (default HTTP)
• INSTANCE_MUST_TAG: Second level of filtering (optional, default to SERVICES_TAG_FILTER)
• INSTANCE_EXCLUDE_TAG: Exclude instances having the given tag (default: canary)
• EXCLUDE_SERVICES: comma-separated services to exclude (default: lbl7.,netsvc-probe.,consul-probed.*)
• CONSUL_TIMELINE_BUFFER: number of entries to keep in the timeline. 1000 by default.
• CONSUL_TIMELINE_BLACKLIST: regexp of services to hide from timeline

Preferences

Some templates allows you to override some behavior through .preferences.rb file. In order to do that, rename .preferences.rb.samples file to .preferences.rb and update lambda defined inside to match targeted behavior.