Feature Description

Whenever the Consul API reports a ServiceAddress or Service.Address, if this value is blank/empty, default to the address of the Node instead of leaving the value blank.

We currently document that a blank value is expected behaviour in the catalog endpoint documentation, although changing this could improve DX and is therefore a feature request.

https://www.consul.io/api/catalog.html#serviceaddress

ServiceAddress is the IP address of the service host — if empty, node address should be used

Use Case(s)

Make it easier for API consumers/clients to retrieve the IP address of a service, even when there is no need for the registration of the service to provide an IP.

Also see:

https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template/issues/587#issuecomment-232456696 https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/issues/4579

@mkeeler this is re: offline chat

I agree with you on the initial issue, but I think that many tools are now doing assumptions based on this value being present or not, see my comment: #7782 (comment)

I'm late to this issue but... what tools would these be, and why would they care about it being empty (""?) vs being filled with an actual IP address? I fail to see why having the actual IP address reflected in Service.Address is a problem vs it's current "" value