A command-line interface for interaction with Apache Kafka
- command auto-completion for bash, zsh, fish shell including dynamic completion for e.g. topics or consumer groups.
- support for avro schemas
- Configuration of different contexts
- directly access kafka clusters inside your kubernetes cluster
You can install the pre-compiled binary or compile from source.
snap:
snap install kafkactl
homebrew:
# install tap repostory once
brew tap deviceinsight/packages
# install kafkactl
brew install deviceinsight/packages/kafkactl
# upgrade kafkactl
brew upgrade deviceinsight/packages/kafkactl
deb/rpm:
Download the .deb or .rpm from the releases page and install with dpkg -i and rpm -i respectively.
yay (AUR)
There's a kafkactl AUR package available for Arch. Install it with your AUR helper of choice (e.g. yay):
yay -S kafkactl
manually:
Download the pre-compiled binaries from the releases page and copy to the desired location.
go get -u github.com/deviceinsight/kafkactl
NOTE: make sure that kafkactl
is on PATH otherwise auto-completion won't work.
If no config file is found, a default config is generated in $HOME/.config/kafkactl/config.yml
.
This configuration is suitable to get started with a single node cluster on a local machine.
Create $HOME/.config/kafkactl/config.yml
with a definition of contexts that should be available
contexts:
default:
brokers:
- localhost:9092
remote-cluster:
brokers:
- remote-cluster001:9092
- remote-cluster002:9092
- remote-cluster003:9092
# optional: tls config
tls:
enabled: true
ca: my-ca
cert: my-cert
certKey: my-key
# set insecure to true to ignore all tls verification (defaults to false)
insecure: false
# optional: sasl support
sasl:
enabled: true
username: admin
password: admin
# optional configure sasl mechanism as plaintext, scram-sha256, scram-sha512 (defaults to plaintext)
mechanism: scram-sha512
# optional: access clusters running kubernetes
kubernetes:
enabled: false
binary: kubectl #optional
kubeConfig: ~/.kube/config #optional
kubeContext: my-cluster
namespace: my-namespace
# optional: clientID config (defaults to kafkactl-{username})
clientID: my-client-id
# optional: kafkaVersion (defaults to 2.0.0)
kafkaVersion: 1.1.1
# optional: timeout for admin requests (defaults to 3s)
requestTimeout: 10s
# optional: avro schema registry
avro:
schemaRegistry: localhost:8081
# optional: changes the default partitioner
defaultPartitioner: "hash"
current-context: default
The config file location is resolved by
- checking for a provided commandline argument:
--config-file=$PATH_TO_CONFIG
- or by evaluating the environment variable:
export KAFKA_CTL_CONFIG=$PATH_TO_CONFIG
- or as default the config file is looked up from one of the following locations:
$HOME/.config/kafkactl/config.yml
$HOME/.kafkactl/config.yml
$SNAP_REAL_HOME/.kafkactl/config.yml
$SNAP_DATA/kafkactl/config.yml
/etc/kafkactl/config.yml
NOTE: if you installed via snap, bash completion should work automatically.
source <(kafkactl completion bash)
To load completions for each session, execute once: Linux:
kafkactl completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/kafkactl
MacOS:
kafkactl completion bash > /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/kafkactl
source <(kafkactl completion zsh)
To load completions for each session, execute once:
kafkactl completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_kafkactl"
kafkactl completion fish | source
To load completions for each session, execute once:
kafkactl completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/kafkactl.fish
Assuming your Kafka broker is accessible as kafka:9092
, you can list topics by running:
docker run --env BROKERS=kafka:9092 deviceinsight/kafkactl:latest get topics
If a more elaborate config is needed, you can mount it as a volume:
docker run -v /absolute/path/to/config.yml:/etc/kafkactl/config.yml deviceinsight/kafkactl get topics
Every key in the config.yml
can be overwritten via environment variables. The corresponding environment variable
for a key can be found by applying the following rules:
- replace
.
by_
- replace
-
by_
- write the key name in ALL CAPS
e.g. the key contexts.default.tls.certKey
has the corresponding environment variable CONTEXTS_DEFAULT_TLS_CERTKEY
.
If environment variables for the default
context should be set, the prefix CONTEXTS_DEFAULT_
can be omitted.
So, instead of CONTEXTS_DEFAULT_TLS_CERTKEY
one can also set TLS_CERTKEY
.
See root_test.go for more examples.
🚧 This feature is still experimental.
If your kafka cluster is not directly accessible from your machine, but it is accessible from a kubernetes cluster
which in turn is accessible via kubectl
from your machine you can configure kubernetes support:
contexts:
kafka-cluster:
brokers:
- broker1:9092
- broker2:9092
kubernetes:
enabled: true
binary: kubectl #optional
kubeContext: k8s-cluster
namespace: k8s-namespace
Instead of directly talking to kafka brokers a kafkactl docker image is deployed as a pod into the kubernetes cluster, and the defined namespace. Standard-Input and Standard-Output are then wired between the pod and your shell running kafkactl.
There are two options:
-
You can run
kafkactl attach
with your kubernetes cluster configured. This will usekubectl run
to create a pod in the configured kubeContext/namespace which runs an image of kafkactl and gives you abash
into the container. Standard-in is piped to the pod and standard-out, standard-err directly to your shell. You even get auto-completion. -
You can run any other kafkactl command with your kubernetes cluster configured. Instead of directly querying the cluster a pod is deployed, and input/output are wired between pod and your shell.
The names of the brokers have to match the service names used to access kafka in your cluster. A command like this should give you this information:
kubectl get svc | grep kafka
💡 The first option takes a bit longer to start up since an Ubuntu based docker image is used in order to have a bash available. The second option uses a docker image build from scratch and should therefore be quicker. Which option is more suitable, will depend on your use-case.
⚠️ when kafkactl was installed via snap make sure to configure the absolute path to yourkubectl
binary. Snaps run with a different $PATH and therefore are unable to access binaries on $PATH.
The documentation for all available commands can be found here:
Consuming messages from a topic can be done with:
kafkactl consume my-topic
In order to consume starting from the oldest offset use:
kafkactl consume my-topic --from-beginning
The following example prints message key
and timestamp
as well as partition
and offset
in yaml
format:
kafkactl consume my-topic --print-keys --print-timestamps -o yaml
Headers of kafka messages can be printed with the parameter --print-headers
e.g.:
kafkactl consume my-topic --print-headers -o yaml
If one is only interested in the last n
messages this can be achieved by --tail
e.g.:
kafkactl consume my-topic --tail=5
The consumer can be stopped when the latest offset is reached using --exit
parameter e.g.:
kafkactl consume my-topic --from-beginning --exit
The following example prints keys in hex and values in base64:
kafkactl consume my-topic --print-keys --key-encoding=hex --value-encoding=base64
Producing messages can be done in multiple ways. If we want to produce a message with key='my-key'
,
value='my-value'
to the topic my-topic
this can be achieved with one of the following commands:
echo "my-key#my-value" | kafkactl produce my-topic --separator=#
echo "my-value" | kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value
If we have a file containing messages where each line contains key
and value
separated by #
, the file can be
used as input to produce messages to topic my-topic
:
cat myfile | kafkactl produce my-topic --separator=#
The same can be accomplished without piping the file to stdin with the --file
parameter:
kafkactl produce my-topic --separator=# --file=myfile
If the messages in the input file need to be split by a different delimiter than \n
a custom line separator can be provided:
kafkactl produce my-topic --separator=# --lineSeparator=|| --file=myfile
NOTE: if the file was generated with kafkactl consume --print-keys --print-timestamps my-topic
the produce
command is able to detect the message timestamp in the input and will ignore it.
the number of messages produced per second can be controlled with the --rate
parameter:
cat myfile | kafkactl produce my-topic --separator=# --rate=200
It is also possible to specify the partition to insert the message:
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value --partition=2
Additionally, a different partitioning scheme can be used. When a key
is provided the default partitioner
uses the hash
of the key
to assign a partition. So the same key
will end up in the same partition:
# the following 3 messages will all be inserted to the same partition
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value
# the following 3 messages will probably be inserted to different partitions
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value --partitioner=random
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value --partitioner=random
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value --partitioner=random
Message headers can also be written:
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=my-key --value=my-value --header key1:value1 --header key2:value\:2
The following example writes the key from base64 and value from hex:
kafkactl produce my-topic --key=dGVzdC1rZXk= --key-encoding=base64 --value=0000000000000000 --value-encoding=hex
In order to enable avro support you just have to add the schema registry to your configuration:
contexts:
localhost:
avro:
schemaRegistry: localhost:8081
kafkactl
will lookup the topic in the schema registry in order to determine if key or value needs to be avro encoded.
If producing with the latest schemaVersion
is sufficient, no additional configuration is needed an kafkactl
handles
this automatically.
If however one needs to produce an older schemaVersion
this can be achieved by providing the parameters keySchemaVersion
, valueSchemaVersion
.
# create a topic
kafkactl create topic avro_topic
# add a schema for the topic value
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/vnd.schemaregistry.v1+json" \
--data '{"schema": "{\"type\": \"record\", \"name\": \"LongList\", \"fields\" : [{\"name\": \"next\", \"type\": [\"null\", \"LongList\"], \"default\": null}]}"}' \
http://localhost:8081/subjects/avro_topic-value/versions
# produce a message
kafkactl produce avro_topic --value {\"next\":{\"LongList\":{}}}
# consume the message
kafkactl consume avro_topic --from-beginning --print-schema -o yaml
As for producing kafkactl
will also lookup the topic in the schema registry to determine if key or value needs to be
decoded with an avro schema.
The consume
command handles this automatically and no configuration is needed.
An additional parameter print-schema
can be provided to display the schema used for decoding.
Using the alter topic
command allows you to change the partition count, replication factor and topic-level
configurations of an existing topic.
The partition count can be increased with:
kafkactl alter topic my-topic --partitions 32
The replication factor can be altered with:
kafkactl alter topic my-topic --replication-factor 2
ℹ️ when altering replication factor, kafkactl tries to keep the number of replicas assigned to each broker balanced. If you need more control over the assigned replicas use
alter partition
directly.
The topic configs can be edited by supplying key value pairs as follows:
kafkactl alter topic my-topic --config retention.ms=3600000 --config cleanup.policy=compact
💡 use the flag
--validate-only
to perform a dry-run without actually modifying the topic
The assigned replicas of a partition can directly be altered with:
# set brokers 102,103 as replicas for partition 3 of topic my-topic
kafkactl alter topic my-topic 3 -r 102,103
In order to get a list of consumer groups the get consumer-groups
command can be used:
# all available consumer groups
kafkactl get consumer-groups
# only consumer groups for a single topic
kafkactl get consumer-groups --topic my-topic
# using command alias
kafkactl get cg
To get detailed information about the consumer group use describe consumer-group
. If the parameter --partitions
is provided details will be printed for each partition otherwise the partitions are aggregated to the clients.
# describe a consumer group
kafkactl describe consumer-group my-group
# show partition details only for partitions with lag
kafkactl describe consumer-group my-group --only-with-lag
# show details only for a single topic
kafkactl describe consumer-group my-group --topic my-topic
# using command alias
kafkactl describe cg my-group
in order to ensure the reset does what it is expected, per default only
the results are printed without actually executing it. Use the additional parameter --execute
to perform the reset.
# reset offset of for all partitions to oldest offset
kafkactl reset offset my-group --topic my-topic --oldest
# reset offset of for all partitions to newest offset
kafkactl reset offset my-group --topic my-topic --newest
# reset offset for a single partition to specific offset
kafkactl reset offset my-group --topic my-topic --partition 5 --offset 100
Available ACL operations are documented here.
# create an acl that allows topic read for a user 'consumer'
kafkactl create acl --topic my-topic --operation read --principal User:consumer --allow
# create an acl that denies topic write for a user 'consumer' coming from a specific host
kafkactl create acl --topic my-topic --operation write --host 1.2.3.4 --principal User:consumer --deny
# allow multiple operations
kafkactl create acl --topic my-topic --operation read --operation describe --principal User:consumer --allow
# allow on all topics with prefix common prefix
kafkactl create acl --topic my-prefix --pattern prefixed --operation read --principal User:consumer --allow
# list all acl
kafkactl get acl
# list all acl (alias command)
kafkactl get access-control-list
# filter only topic resources
kafkactl get acl --topics
# filter only consumer group resources with operation read
kafkactl get acl --groups --operation read
# delete all topic read acls
kafkactl delete acl --topics --operation read --pattern any
# delete all topic acls for any operation
kafkactl delete acl --topics --operation any --pattern any
# delete all cluster acls for any operation
kafkactl delete acl --cluster --operation any --pattern any
# delete all consumer-group acls with operation describe, patternType prefixed and permissionType allow
kafkactl delete acl --groups --operation describe --pattern prefixed --allow