Integrating Nacos Service Discovery into a Spring Cloud Microservice Project – Step‑by‑Step Guide

Nacos, an open‑source project from Alibaba, provides dynamic service discovery, configuration management, and service governance for building cloud‑native applications.

1. Add Nacos discovery dependency – Include the following Maven dependency in the pom.xml of the passjava-common module:

<!-- nacos discovery service component -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
</dependency>

2. Download and start Nacos Server – Obtain the Nacos server zip from GitHub releases . After extracting, run the appropriate startup script:

Linux/Unix/macOS: sh startup.sh -m standalone Windows: cmd startup.cmd If Windows reports Please set the JAVA_HOME variable…, edit startup.cmd and replace %JAVA_HOME% with the actual JDK path, e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_131. After fixing, the server starts successfully.

3. Configure each microservice – In the application.yml of every service module (passjava‑question, passjava‑channel, etc.), add the Nacos discovery address:

spring:
  cloud:
    nacos:
      discovery:
        server-addr: 127.0.0.1:8848

4. Enable discovery annotations – Add @EnableDiscoveryClient (and other needed annotations such as @MapperScan) to the main application class of each service:

@EnableDiscoveryClient
@MapperScan("com.jackson0714.passjava.question.dao")
@SpringBootApplication
public class PassjavaQuestionApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(PassjavaQuestionApplication.class, args);
    }
}

5. Set service name – Define a unique name for each microservice in application.yml:

spring:
  application:
    name: passjava-question

6. Access the Nacos dashboard – Open http://localhost:8848/nacos/index.html#/login, log in with username nacos and password nacos. The dashboard lists all registered services, e.g. passjava-channel, passjava-member, passjava-study, passjava-question, passjava-content.

The complete source code for this tutorial is available at https://github.com/Jackson0714/PassJava-Platform .