bitnami-containers/bitnami/consul

Bitnami Secure Image for HashiCorp Consul

What is HashiCorp Consul?

HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure.

Overview of HashiCorp Consul Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

TL;DR

docker run --name consul bitnami/consul:latest

You can find the available configuration options in the Environment Variables section.

⚠️ Important Notice: Upcoming changes to the Bitnami Catalog

Beginning August 28th, 2025, Bitnami will evolve its public catalog to offer a curated set of hardened, security-focused images under the new Bitnami Secure Images initiative. As part of this transition:

• Granting community users access for the first time to security-optimized versions of popular container images.
• Bitnami will begin deprecating support for non-hardened, Debian-based software images in its free tier and will gradually remove non-latest tags from the public catalog. As a result, community users will have access to a reduced number of hardened images. These images are published only under the “latest” tag and are intended for development purposes
• Starting August 28th, over two weeks, all existing container images, including older or versioned tags (e.g., 2.50.0, 10.6), will be migrated from the public catalog (docker.io/bitnami) to the “Bitnami Legacy” repository (docker.io/bitnamilegacy), where they will no longer receive updates.
• For production workloads and long-term support, users are encouraged to adopt Bitnami Secure Images, which include hardened containers, smaller attack surfaces, CVE transparency (via VEX/KEV), SBOMs, and enterprise support.

These changes aim to improve the security posture of all Bitnami users by promoting best practices for software supply chain integrity and up-to-date deployments. For more details, visit the Bitnami Secure Images announcement.

Why use Bitnami Secure Images?

• Bitnami Secure Images and Helm charts are built to make open source more secure and enterprise ready.
• Triage security vulnerabilities faster, with transparency into CVE risks using industry standard Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX), KEV, and EPSS scores.
• Our hardened images use a minimal OS (Photon Linux), which reduces the attack surface while maintaining extensibility through the use of an industry standard package format.
• Stay more secure and compliant with continuously built images updated within hours of upstream patches.
• Bitnami containers, virtual machines and cloud images use the same components and configuration approach - making it easy to switch between formats based on your project needs.
• Hardened images come with attestation signatures (Notation), SBOMs, virus scan reports and other metadata produced in an SLSA-3 compliant software factory.

Only a subset of BSI applications are available for free. Looking to access the entire catalog of applications as well as enterprise support? Try the commercial edition of Bitnami Secure Images today.

How to deploy HashiCorp Consul in Kubernetes?

Deploying Bitnami applications as Helm Charts is the easiest way to get started with our applications on Kubernetes. Read more about the installation in the Bitnami HashiCorp Consul Chart GitHub repository.

Why use a non-root container?

Non-root container images add an extra layer of security and are generally recommended for production environments. However, because they run as a non-root user, privileged tasks are typically off-limits. Learn more about non-root containers in our docs.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Learn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.

You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml.

Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.

Get this image

The recommended way to get the Bitnami HashiCorp Consul Docker Image is to pull the prebuilt image from the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/consul:latest

To use a specific version, you can pull a versioned tag. You can view the list of available versions in the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/consul:[TAG]

If you wish, you can also build the image yourself by cloning the repository, changing to the directory containing the Dockerfile and executing the docker build command. Remember to replace the APP, VERSION and OPERATING-SYSTEM path placeholders in the example command below with the correct values.

git clone https://github.com/bitnami/containers.git
cd bitnami/APP/VERSION/OPERATING-SYSTEM
docker build -t bitnami/APP:latest .

Persisting your application

If you remove the container all your data and configurations will be lost, and the next time you run the image the database will be reinitialized. To avoid this loss of data, you should mount a volume that will persist even after the container is removed.

For persistence you should mount a volume at the /bitnami path. The above examples define a docker volume namely consul_data. The HashiCorp Consul application state will persist as long as this volume is not removed.

To avoid inadvertent removal of this volume you can mount host directories as data volumes. Alternatively you can make use of volume plugins to host the volume data.

docker run -v /path/to/consul-persistence:/bitnami bitnami/consul:latest

or using Docker Compose:

consul:
  image: bitnami/consul:latest
  volumes:
    - /path/to/consul-persistence:/bitnami

NOTE: As this is a non-root container, the mounted files and directories must have the proper permissions for the UID 1001.

Connecting to other containers

Using Docker container networking, a different server running inside a container can easily be accessed by your application containers and vice-versa.

Containers attached to the same network can communicate with each other using the container name as the hostname.

Using the Command Line

Step 1: Create a network

docker network create consul-network --driver bridge

Step 2: Launch the HashiCorp Consul container within your network

Use the --network <NETWORK> argument to the docker run command to attach the container to the consul-network network.

docker run --name consul-node1 --network consul-network bitnami/consul:latest

Step 3: Run another containers

We can launch another containers using the same flag (--network NETWORK) in the docker run command. If you also set a name to your container, you will be able to use it as hostname in your network.

Using a Docker Compose file

When not specified, Docker Compose automatically sets up a new network and attaches all deployed services to that network. However, we will explicitly define a new bridge network named consul-network.

version: '2'

networks:
  consul-network:
    driver: bridge

services:
  consul:
    image: bitnami/consul:latest
    networks:
      - consul-network
    ports:
      - 8300:8300
      - 8301:8301
      - 8301:8301/udp
      - 8500:8500
      - 8600:8600
      - 8600:8600/udp

Then, launch the containers using:

docker-compose up -d

Setting up a cluster using Docker Compose

This is the simplest way to run HashiCorp Consul with clustering configuration:

Step 1: Add a server node in your docker-compose.yml

Copy the snippet below into your docker-compose.yml to add a HashiCorp Consul server node to your cluster configuration.

version: '2'

services:
  consul-node1:
    image: bitnami/consul:latest
    environment:
      - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
      - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
      - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
      - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
    ports:
      - 8300:8300
      - 8301:8301
      - 8301:8301/udp
      - 8500:8500
      - 8600:8600
      - 8600:8600/udp
    volumes:
      - consul-node1_data:/bitnami

Note: The value of the CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT should reflect the total number of nodes the cluster will have.

Step 2: Add extra nodes to your configuration

Update the definitions for nodes you want your HashiCorp Consul node cluster with. If it is a remote WAN node, use CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_WAN_ADDRESS.

consul-node2:
  image: bitnami/consul:latest
  environment:
    - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
    - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
    - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
    - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
    - CONSUL_ENABLE_UI=false
  volumes:
    - consul-node2_data:/bitnami

consul-node3:
  image: bitnami/consul:latest
  environment:
    - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
    - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
    - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
    - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
    - CONSUL_ENABLE_UI=false
  volumes:
    - consul-node3_data:/bitnami

Step 3: Add the volume description

volumes:
  consul-node1_data:
    driver: local
  consul-node2_data:
    driver: local
  consul-node3_data:
    driver: local

The final docker-compose.yml will look like this:

version: '2'

services:
  consul-node1:
    image: bitnami/consul:latest
    environment:
      - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
      - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
      - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
      - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
    ports:
      - 8300:8300
      - 8301:8301
      - 8301:8301/udp
      - 8500:8500
      - 8600:8600
      - 8600:8600/udp
    volumes:
      - consul-node1_data:/bitnami

  consul-node2:
    image: bitnami/consul:latest
    environment:
      - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
      - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
      - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
      - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
      - CONSUL_ENABLE_UI=false
    volumes:
      - consul-node2_data:/bitnami

  consul-node3:
    image: bitnami/consul:latest
    environment:
      - CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT=3
      - CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
      - CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE=true
      - CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS=consul-node1
      - CONSUL_ENABLE_UI=false
    volumes:
      - consul-node3_data:/bitnami

volumes:
  consul-node1_data:
    driver: local
  consul-node2_data:
    driver: local
  consul-node3_data:
    driver: local

Configuration

Environment variables

Customizable environment variables

Name	Description	Default Value
CONSUL_RPC_PORT_NUMBER	Consul RPC port number.	8300
CONSUL_HTTP_PORT_NUMBER	Consul HTTP port number.	8500
CONSUL_HTTPS_PORT_NUMBER	Consul HTTPS port number.	-1
CONSUL_DNS_PORT_NUMBER	Consul DNS port number.	8600
CONSUL_AGENT_MODE	Consul agent mode.	server
CONSUL_DISABLE_KEYRING_FILE	Disable keyring file in Consul.	false
CONSUL_SERF_LAN_ADDRESS	LAN address for Serf daemon.	0.0.0.0
CONSUL_SERF_LAN_PORT_NUMBER	LAN port for Serf daemon.	8301
CONSUL_CLIENT_LAN_ADDRESS	LAN address for Consul clients.	0.0.0.0
CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS	Consul node retry join address.	127.0.0.1
CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_WAN_ADDRESS	Consul retry join WAN address.	127.0.0.1
CONSUL_BIND_INTERFACE	Consul bind interface.	nil
CONSUL_BIND_ADDR	Consul bind address.	nil
CONSUL_ENABLE_UI	Enable User Interface in Consul.	true
CONSUL_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT	Expect bootstrap in Consul.	1
CONSUL_RAFT_MULTIPLIER	Consul Raft multiplier.	1
CONSUL_LOCAL_CONFIG	Consul local configuration.	nil
CONSUL_GOSSIP_ENCRYPTION	Use gossip encryption in Consul.	no
CONSUL_GOSSIP_ENCRYPTION_KEY	Base64-encoded Consul gossip private symmetric key.	nil
CONSUL_DATACENTER	Consul datacenter name.	dc1
CONSUL_DOMAIN	Consul domain.	consul
CONSUL_NODE_NAME	Consul domain name.	nil
CONSUL_DISABLE_HOST_NODE_ID	Disable host node ID.	true

Read-only environment variables

Name	Description	Value
CONSUL_BASE_DIR	Consul installation directory.	${BITNAMI_ROOT_DIR}/consul
CONSUL_CONF_DIR	Consul configuration directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/conf
CONSUL_DEFAULT_CONF_DIR	Consul default configuration directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/conf.default
CONSUL_BIN_DIR	Consul binary directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/bin
CONSUL_CONF_FILE	Consul configuration file.	${CONSUL_CONF_DIR}/consul.json
CONSUL_ENCRYPT_FILE	Consul encrytion configuration file.	${CONSUL_CONF_DIR}/encrypt.json
CONSUL_LOCAL_FILE	Consul local configuration file.	${CONSUL_CONF_DIR}/local.json
CONSUL_LOG_DIR	Directory where Consul logs are stored.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/logs
CONSUL_LOG_FILE	Consul log file.	${CONSUL_LOG_DIR}/consul.log
CONSUL_VOLUME_DIR	Consul persistence directory.	/bitnami/consul
CONSUL_DATA_DIR	Consul directory where data is stored.	${CONSUL_VOLUME_DIR}
CONSUL_SSL_DIR	Consul SSL directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/certificates
CONSUL_TMP_DIR	Consul temporary directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/tmp
CONSUL_PID_FILE	Path to the PID file for Consul.	${CONSUL_TMP_DIR}/consul.pid
CONSUL_TEMPLATES_DIR	Consul templates directory.	${CONSUL_BASE_DIR}/templates
CONSUL_CONFIG_TEMPLATE_FILE	Consul configuration template file.	${CONSUL_TEMPLATES_DIR}/consul.json.tpl
CONSUL_ENCRYPT_TEMPLATE_FILE	Consul encrypt configuration template file.	${CONSUL_TEMPLATES_DIR}/encrypt.json.tpl
CONSUL_LOCAL_TEMPLATE_FILE	Consul local configuration template file.	${CONSUL_TEMPLATES_DIR}/local.json.tpl
CONSUL_INITSCRIPTS_DIR	Consul directory for init scripts.	/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
CONSUL_DAEMON_USER	Consul system user.	consul
CONSUL_DAEMON_GROUP	Consul system group.	consul

Specifying Environment Variables using Docker Compose

consul:
  image: bitnami/consul:latest
  environment:
    - CONSUL_HTTP_PORT_NUMBER=8888

Specifying Environment Variables on the Docker command line

docker run -d -e CONSUL_HTTP_PORT_NUMBER=8888 --name consul bitnami/consul:latest

Using custom HashiCorp Consul configuration files

In order to load your own configuration files, you will have to make them available to the container. You can do it doing the following:

• Mounting a volume with your custom configuration
• Adding custom configuration via environment variable.

By default, the configuration of HashiCorp Consul is written to /opt/bitnami/consul/consul.json file and persisted with the following content:

{
    "datacenter":"dc1",
    "domain":"consul",
    "data_dir":"/opt/bitnami/consul/data",
    "pid_file":"/opt/bitnami/consul/tmp/consul.pid",
    "server":true,
    "ui":true,
    "bootstrap_expect":1,
    "addresses": {
        "http":"0.0.0.0"
    },
    "retry_join": ["127.0.0.1"],
    "ports": {
        "http":8500,
        "dns":8600,
        "serf_lan":8301,
        "server":8300
    },
    "serf_lan":"0.0.0.0"
}

Configuring environment variables

Configuration can be added by passing the configuration in JSON format via the environment variable CONSUL_LOCAL_CONFIG. Then consul will write a local.json file in the HashiCorp Consul configuration directory. HashiCorp Consul will load all files within the configuration directory in alphabetical order, so ones with starting with higher letters will prevail.

docker run -d -e CONSUL_LOCAL_CONFIG='{
    "datacenter":"us_west",
    "server":true,
    "enable_debug":true
}' \
     --name consul bitnami/consul:latest

Mounting a volume

Check the [Persisting your data](# Persisting your application) section to add custom volumes to the HashiCorp Consul container

Configuring the Gossip encryption key

Specifies the secret key to use for encryption of HashiCorp Consul network traffic. This key must be 16-bytes that are Base64-encoded. The easiest way to create an encryption key is to use consul keygen

docker run --name consul bitnami/consul:latest consul keygen

This command will generate a keygen, that you can add to your Dockerfile, docker-compose or pass it via command line:

docker run -e CONSUL_GOSSIP_ENCRYPTION_KEY=YOUR_GENERATED_KEY --name consul bitnami/consul:latest

Deploying a Docker Compose file

consul:
  image: bitnami/consul:latest
  volumes:
    - /local/path/to/your/confDir:/opt/bitnami/consul/conf

The container has a HashiCorp Consul configuration directory set up at /consul/config and the agent will load any configuration files placed here by binding a volume or by composing a new image and adding files. Alternatively, configuration can be added by passing the configuration JSON via environment variable CONSUL_LOCAL_CONFIG. If this is bind mounted then ownership will be changed to the consul user when the container starts.

FIPS configuration in Bitnami Secure Images

The Bitnami HashiCorp Consul Docker image from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog includes extra features and settings to configure the container with FIPS capabilities. You can configure the next environment variables:

• OPENSSL_FIPS: whether OpenSSL runs in FIPS mode or not. yes (default), no.

Logging

The Bitnami consul Docker image sends the container logs to the stdout. To view the logs:

docker logs consul

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose logs consul

You can configure the containers logging driver using the --log-driver option if you wish to consume the container logs differently. In the default configuration docker uses the json-file driver.

Maintenance

Upgrade this image

Bitnami provides up-to-date versions of consul, including security patches, soon after they are made upstream. We recommend that you follow these steps to upgrade your container.

Step 1: Get the updated image

docker pull bitnami/consul:latest

or if you're using Docker Compose, update the value of the image property to bitnami/consul:latest.

Step 2: Stop and backup the currently running container

Stop the currently running container using the command

docker stop consul

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose stop consul

Next, take a snapshot of the persistent volume /path/to/consul-persistence using:

rsync -a /path/to/consul-persistence /path/to/consul-persistence.bkp.$(date +%Y%m%d-%H.%M.%S)

You can use this snapshot to restore the database state should the upgrade fail.

Step 3: Remove the currently running container

docker rm -v consul

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose rm -v consul

Step 4: Run the new image

Re-create your container from the new image, restoring your backup if necessary.

docker run --name consul bitnami/consul:latest

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose up consul

Notable Changes

Debian 1.6.1-r6 and Oracle 1.6.1-r7

Decrease the size of the container. The configuration logic is now based on Bash scripts in the rootfs/ folder. Also, some env var changes have been performed maintaining backward compatibility through aliases:

New value	Old value
CONSUL_ENABLE_UI	CONSUL_UI
CONSUL_AGENT_MODE	CONSUL_SERVER_MODE
CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN_ADDRESS	CONSUL_RETRY_JOIN

1.4.0-r16

• The Consul container has been migrated to a non-root user approach. Previously the container ran as the root user and the Consul daemon was started as the consul user. From now on, both the container and the Consul daemon run as user 1001. As a consequence, the data directory must be writable by that user. You can revert this behavior by changing USER 1001 to USER root in the Dockerfile.

Using docker-compose.yaml

Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes. For production-ready deployments, we highly recommend utilizing its associated Bitnami Helm chart.

If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.

Contributing

We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.

Issues

If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. For us to provide better support, be sure to fill the issue template.

License

Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.