Copyright (c) 2014, Magnus Edenhill

https://github.com/edenhill/kafkacat

kafkacat is a generic non-JVM producer and consumer for Apache Kafka 0.8, think of it as a netcat for Kafka.

In producer mode kafkacat reads messages from stdin, delimited with a configurable delimeter (-D, defaults to newline), and produces them to the provided Kafka cluster (-b), topic (-t) and partition (-p).

In consumer mode kafkacat reads messages from a topic and partition and prints them to stdout using the configured message delimiter.

kafkacat also features a Metadata list (-L) mode to display the current state of the Kafka cluster and its topics and partitions.

kafkacat is fast and lightweight; statically linked it is no more than 150Kb.

• librdkafka - https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka
• libyajl (for JSON support, optional)

On Ubuntu or Debian: sudo apt-get install librdkafka-dev libyajl-dev

./configure <usual-configure-options>
make
sudo make install

The bootstrap.sh build script will download and build the required dependencies, providing a quick and easy means of building kafkacat. Internet connectivity and wget is required by this script. The resulting kafkacat binary will be linked statically to avoid runtime dependencies.

./bootstrap.sh

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog | kafkacat -b mybroker -t syslog -p 0 -z snappy

$ kafkacat -b mybroker -t syslog -p 0

$ kafkacat -P -b mybroker -t filedrop -p 0 myfile1.bin /etc/motd thirdfile.tgz

$ kafkacat -C -b mybroker -t syslog -p 0 -o -2000 -e

$ kafkacat -C -b mybroker -t syslog

$ kafkacat -L -b mybroker
Metadata for all topics (from broker 1: mybroker:9092/1):
 3 brokers:
  broker 1 at mybroker:9092
  broker 2 at mybrokertoo:9092
  broker 3 at thirdbroker:9092
 16 topics:
  topic "syslog" with 3 partitions:
    partition 0, leader 3, replicas: 1,2,3, isrs: 1,2,3
    partition 1, leader 1, replicas: 1,2,3, isrs: 1,2,3
    partition 2, leader 1, replicas: 1,2, isrs: 1,2
  topic "rdkafkatest1_auto_49f744a4327b1b1e" with 2 partitions:
    partition 0, leader 3, replicas: 3, isrs: 3
    partition 1, leader 1, replicas: 1, isrs: 1
  topic "rdkafkatest1_auto_e02f58f2c581cba" with 2 partitions:
    partition 0, leader 3, replicas: 3, isrs: 3
    partition 1, leader 1, replicas: 1, isrs: 1
  ....