# Nacos: Dynamic *Na*ming and *Co*nfiguration *S*ervice
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## What does it do
Nacos (official site: [http://nacos.io](http://nacos.io)) is an easy-to-use platform designed for dynamic service discovery and configuration and service management. It helps you to build cloud native applications and microservices platform easily.
Service is a first-class citizen in Nacos. Nacos supports almost all type of services,for example,[Dubbo/gRPC service](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/use-nacos-with-dubbo.html)、[Spring Cloud RESTFul service](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/use-nacos-with-springcloud.html) or [Kubernetes service](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/use-nacos-with-kubernetes.html).
Nacos provides four major functions.
* **Service Discovery and Service Health Check**
Nacos makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. Nacos also provides real-time healthchecks of services to prevent sending requests to unhealthy hosts or service instance.
* **Dynamic Configuration Management**
Dynamic Configuration Service allows you to manage configurations of all services in a centralized and dynamic manner across all environments. Nacos eliminates the need to redeploy applications and services when configurations are updated,which makes configuration changes more efficient and agile.
* **Dynamic DNS Service**
Nacos supports weighted routing, making it easier for you to implement mid-tier load balancing, flexible routing policies, flow control, and simple DNS resolution services in the production environment within your data center. It helps you to implement DNS-based service discovery easily and prevent applications from coupling to vendor-specific service discovery APIs.
* **Service and MetaData Management**
Nacos provides an easy-to-use service dashboard to help you manage your services metadata, configuration, kubernetes DNS, service health and metrics statistics.
## Quick Start
It is super easy to get started with your first project.
#### Step 1: Download the binary package
You can download the package from the [latest stable release](https://github.com/alibaba/nacos/releases).
Take release nacos-server-0.4.0.zip for example.
```
unzip nacos-server-0.4.0.zip
cd nacos/bin
```
#### Step 2: Start Server
On the **Linux/Unix/Mac** platform, run the following command to start server with standalone mode:
```
sh startup.sh -m standalone
```
On the **Windows** platform, run the following command to start server with standalone mode. Alternatively, you can also double-click the startup.cmd to run NacosServer.
```
cmd startup.cmd -m standalone
```
For more details, see [quick-start.](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/quick-start.html)
## Quick start for other open-source projects:
* [Quick start with Nacos command and console](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/quick-start.html)
* [Quick start with dubbo](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/use-nacos-with-dubbo.html)
* [Quick start with spring cloud](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/quick-start-spring-cloud.html)
* [Quick start with kubernetes](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/use-nacos-with-kubernetes.html)
## Documentation
You can view the full documentation from the [Nacos website](https://nacos.io/en-us/docs/what-is-nacos.html).
## Contributing
Contributors are welcomed to join Nacos project. Please check [CONTRIBUTING](./CONTRIBUTING.md) about how to contribute to this project.
## Other Related Project Repositories
* [nacos-spring-project](https://github.com/nacos-group/nacos-spring-project) provides the integration functionality for Spring.
* [nacos-group](https://github.com/nacos-group) is the reposity that hosts the eco tools for Nacos, such as SDK, synchronization tool, etc.
* [spring-cloud-alibaba](https://github.com/spring-cloud-incubator/spring-cloud-alibaba) provides the one-stop solution for application development over Alibaba middleware which includes Nacos.
## Contact
* [Gitter](https://gitter.im/alibaba/nacos): Nacos's IM tool for community messaging, collaboration and discovery.
* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nacos2): Follow along for latest nacos news on Twitter.
* [Weibo](https://weibo.com/u/6574374908): Follow along for latest nacos news on Weibo (Twitter of China version).
* [Nacos Segmentfault](https://segmentfault.com/t/nacos): Get latest notice and prompt help from Segmentfault.
* Email Group:
* users-nacos@googlegroups.com: Nacos usage general discussion.
* dev-nacos@googlegroups.com: Nacos developer discussion (APIs, feature design, etc).
* commits-nacos@googlegroups.com: Commits notice, very high frequency.
* Join us from wechat. Welcome words: Nacos.