hcl VS consul

Compare hcl vs consul and see what are their differences.

hcl

HCL is the HashiCorp configuration language. (by hashicorp)

consul

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure. (by hashicorp)
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hcl consul
40 57
5,060 27,774
1.3% 0.6%
8.2 9.9
8 days ago 3 days ago
Go Go
Mozilla Public License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

hcl

Posts with mentions or reviews of hcl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-23.
  • HCL: Toolkit for Structured Configuration Languages
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2024
  • 7 Programming Languages Every Cloud Engineer Should Know in 2024!
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.
  • Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2024
    Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?
  • 10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
    23 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.
  • Show HN: Togomak – declarative pipeline orchestrator based on HCL and Terraform
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

    [1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

  • Quadlets might make me finally stop using Docker-compose – Major Hayden
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    >https://noyaml.com/

    I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

    Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

    [0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

  • Avoiding DevOps tool hell
    9 projects | dev.to | 24 Jul 2023
    The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.
  • How would one programmatically formatting Terraform HCL
    5 projects | /r/Terraform | 18 Jun 2023
    Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go
  • Announcing binconf - v0.1.5
    2 projects | /r/rust | 24 May 2023
    Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".
  • Why SQL is right for Infrastructure Management
    6 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2023
    When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.

consul

Posts with mentions or reviews of consul. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-23.
  • Deploy Secure Spring Boot Microservices on Amazon EKS Using Terraform and Kubernetes
    13 projects | dev.to | 23 Nov 2023
    The JHipster scaffolded sample application has a gateway application and two microservices. It uses Consul for service discovery and centralized configuration.
  • The Complete Microservices Guide
    17 projects | dev.to | 21 Sep 2023
    Service Discovery: Microservices need to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Service discovery tools like etcd, Consul, or Kubernetes built-in service discovery mechanisms help locate and connect to microservices running on different nodes within the infrastructure.
  • Replicating and Load Balancing Go Applications in Docker Containers with Consul and Fabio
    4 projects | /r/golang | 31 May 2023
    After some research and testing, I landed on using Consul and Fabio as the demo infrastructure. Of course, there is a myriad of other options to accomplish this task, but because of the low configuration and ease of use, I was impressed with this pairing. Both projects are mature and well-supported, and very flexible--just because you can run them with low configuration, doesn't mean you have to. I wanted to keep this demo constrained, but the exercise did get me excited about exploring things further: circuit breakers, traffic splitting, and more complex service meshes.
  • register open-telemetry to consul
    1 project | /r/hashicorp | 5 May 2023
    The goal is to be able to use Consul SD configurations to allow for retrieving scrape targets from consul. Is this possible? Can anyone provide an example? Thank you!!
  • Fly.io outage, recently deployed apps down, no new deployments possible
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2023
    https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/pull/12080 - this should be the Consul issue that brought down Roblox
  • Netdata release 1.38.0
    9 projects | /r/linux | 6 Feb 2023
    The Consul collector is production ready! Consul by HashiCorp is a powerful and complex identity-based networking solution, which is not trivial to monitor. We were lucky to have the assistance of HashiCorp itself in this endeavor, which resulted in a monitoring solution of exceptional quality. Look for common blog posts and announcements in the coming weeks!
  • Micro Frontends for Java Microservices
    6 projects | dev.to | 20 Jan 2023
    Changed the service discovery to Consul, since this is the default in JHipster 8.
  • Website monitoren
    1 project | /r/de_EDV | 2 Jan 2023
  • I Know What You Shipped Last Summer
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Dec 2022
    In another effort to standardize development and operations, Lob has just wrapped up our container orchestration migration from Convox to HashiCorp’s Nomad, led by Senior Platform Engineer Elijah Voigt. In this new ecosystem, one feature available to us is Consul Service Mesh (a feature of Consul, which is part of our Lob Nomad stack).
  • a tool for quickly creating web and microservice code
    28 projects | dev.to | 15 Dec 2022
    Service registry and discovery etcd, consul, nacos

What are some alternatives?

When comparing hcl and consul you can also consider the following projects:

terraform - Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

etcd - Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

k2tf - Kubernetes YAML to Terraform HCL converter

Eureka - AWS Service registry for resilient mid-tier load balancing and failover.

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...

traefik - The Cloud Native Application Proxy

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...

Caddy - Fast and extensible multi-platform HTTP/1-2-3 web server with automatic HTTPS

nomad-driver-containerd - Nomad task driver for launching containers using containerd.

Apache ZooKeeper - Apache ZooKeeper

atlas - Manage your database schema as code

kubernetes - Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management