How can I read consul SRV records in my go application?

I am trying to implement consul for service discovery, and I am having trouble with two things: connecting to a custom DNS server, and formatting my net.LookupSRV() request.

Here is what I'm trying to look up from within my go app:

$ dig @127.0.0.1 -p 8600 serviceb.service.consul SRV

; <<>> DiG 9.8.4-rpz2+rl005.12-P1 <<>> @127.0.0.1 -p 8600 serviceb.service.consul SRV
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4511
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;serviceb.service.consul.	IN	SRV

;; ANSWER SECTION:
serviceb.service.consul. 0	IN	SRV	1 1 80 az1-serviceb1.node.dc1.consul.
serviceb.service.consul. 0	IN	SRV	1 1 80 az2-serviceb2.node.dc1.consul.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
az1-serviceb1.node.dc1.consul. 0 IN	A	10.6.41.22
az2-serviceb2.node.dc1.consul. 0 IN	A	10.6.41.20

;; Query time: 6 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#8600(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Fri May 16 15:09:28 2014
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 275

and here is the relevant code. (I know it's wrong, but just so you can see what I'm trying to do)

cname, addrs, err := net.LookupSRV("serviceb", "service", "consul")
log.Printf("%+v %+v %+v", cname, addrs, err)

and the output:

2014/05/16 15:24:31  [] lookup _serviceb._service.consul: no such host

Any help would be appreciated! thanks

Try to use a more sharp tool such as the github.com/miekg/dns package. Last time I looked at it, it allowed to control virtually every bit of the client-side setup to do DNS resolution.

Consul does support strict RFC 2782 and lookup can be done using the standard library only:

resolver := &net.Resolver{
	Dial: func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) {
		return (&net.Dialer{}).DialContext(ctx, network, "127.0.0.1:8600")
	},
}
_, addrs, err := resolver.LookupSRV(
	context.Background(), "svcname", "tcp", "consul",
)

While this doesn't answer your exact question, I find it's an easier way to access service data for greenfield apps.

It's quite easy to call the HTTP API with net/http:

package main
import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
	"io/ioutil"
)
func main() {
	resp, _ := http.Get("http://localhost:8500/v1/catalog/service/serviceb")
	body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
	fmt.Print(string(body))
}

The basics of the HTTP API are documented in the Services Guide.

The best way is to use PreparedQueries, as Posted here

import (
	"fmt"

	consulapi "github.com/hashicorp/consul/api"
)

func main() {
	config := consulapi.DefaultConfig()
	consul, err := consulapi.NewClient(config)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}

preparedQuery := consul.PreparedQuery()
queryID, _, err := preparedQuery.Create(&consulapi.PreparedQueryDefinition{
    Name: "DnsQuery",
    Service: consulapi.ServiceQuery{
        Service:     "serviceb",
        OnlyPassing: true,
    },
}, &consulapi.WriteOptions{})
if err != nil {
    fmt.Println(err)
}

res, _, _ := preparedQuery.Execute(queryID, &consulapi.QueryOptions{})
for _, node := range res.Nodes {
    fmt.Println(node.Service.Address, node.Service.Port)
}