Persist Sentinel Flow Rules in Nacos: Step‑by‑Step Configuration Guide

Sentinel rule configurations disappear after a service restart; to keep them persistent you can store the rules in a configuration center such as Zookeeper, Apollo, or Nacos.

In our project we already use Nacos as both service registry and configuration center, and we can also use it as the storage repository for Sentinel rule data.

Add Nacos Storage Dependency

Include the following Maven dependency to declare that Sentinel will use Nacos for rule persistence.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.alibaba.csp</groupId>
  <artifactId>sentinel-datasource-nacos</artifactId>
</dependency>

Add YML Configuration

If you enable Sentinel’s independent datasource feature, declare the datasource settings in your application.yml file as follows.

spring:
  application:
    name: stock-service
  profiles:
    active: dev
  cloud:
    sentinel:
      transport:
        port: 8719
        dashboard: localhost:8080
      enabled: true
      datasource:
        ds:
          nacos:
            dataId: ${spring.application.name}-flow-rules
            groupId: DEFAULT_GROUP
            data-type: json
            rule-type: flow

Add Nacos Configuration

In the Nacos console, create a new configuration entry for the Sentinel rules and publish it. Be careful to use the correct dataId and groupId, otherwise the rules cannot be found.

Example JSON template for a flow rule:

[
  {
    "resource": "abc",
    "controlBehavior": 0,
    "count": 20.0,
    "grade": 1,
    "limitApp": "default",
    "strategy": 0
  }
]

Verify Sentinel Configuration

Start the service and open the Sentinel dashboard; under the "Flow Control" menu you can view the rules that were defined in Nacos.

Summary

We have completed all steps to persist Sentinel rules to Nacos. Note that after modifying rules in the Sentinel console, the changes are not automatically synchronized back to Nacos; to achieve this you must modify the Sentinel console source code to push updates to Nacos.

For more details, refer to the official Sentinel documentation: https://github.com/alibaba/Sentinel/wiki/Sentinel-%E6%8E%A7%E5%88%B6%E5%8F%B0%EF%BC%88%E9%9B%86%E7%BE%A4%E6%B5%81%E6%8E%A7%E7%AE%A1%E7%90%86%EF%BC%89#%E8%A7%84%E5%88%99%E9%85%8D%E7%BD%AE