In the previous recipe, we had our Consul service installed and experimented with its key/value capabilities to learn how we could manipulate the data in it in order to integrate Consul with our application and make the data extraction process seamless and non-invasive from an application standpoint.

As we don't want our application to know anything about Consul and have to explicitly connect to it, even though such a possibility exists, we will employ another utility, also created as open source by Hashicorp, called envconsul. It will connect to the Consul service for us, extract the specified configuration key/value tree, and expose it as the environment variables to be used while also launching our application. Pretty cool, right?