consul throwing an error
It looks like that the official Consul documentation is more up to date than the link that was posted in the question.

If one starts with the Getting Started guide, then one could start a consul agent in no time and the documentation also explains how to proceed.

user@localhost /tmp $ ./consul agent -dev
==&gt; Starting Consul agent...
==&gt; Consul agent running!
           Version: 'v1.0.6'
           Node ID: '777c5475-bc78-6e38-75a6-42038eef7cb8'
         Node name: 'localhost.localdomain'
        Datacenter: 'dc1' (Segment: '&lt;all&gt;')
            Server: true (Bootstrap: false)
       Client Addr: [127.0.0.1] (HTTP: 8500, HTTPS: -1, DNS: 8600)
      Cluster Addr: 127.0.0.1 (LAN: 8301, WAN: 8302)
           Encrypt: Gossip: false, TLS-Outgoing: false, TLS-Incoming: false

==&gt; Log data will now stream in as it occurs:

    2018/04/09 21:33:04 [DEBUG] Using random ID "777c5475-bc78-6e38-75a6-42038eef7cb8" as node ID