Kafkacat Quick Reference
Contents
- Produce
- Consume
- List Topics
- Read Messages From File
- Generate a Test File of Messages
- Read the Last n Messages from Partition n
kafkacat is a useful tool for working with Kafka brokers. It’s quick and very simple to use. This is a cheatsheet of some useful commands.
Produce
$ echo "foo" | kafkacat -b localhost:9092 -t mytopic
Consume
kafkacat -C -b localhost:9092 -t mytopic
List Topics
kafkacat -b localhost:9092 -L -t mytopic
Read Messages From File
Read messages from a file, with each message separated by a newline:
kafkacat -P -l -b kafka:9092 -t mytopic myfile
Generate a Test File of Messages
Given a file containing a DATE
variable, generate a set of messages with incrementing timestamp, for use with the previous example:
for i in {1..5000}; do DATE=`date -u +%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S`; sed "s~DATE~$DATE~" template.msg >> myfile; done
Read the Last n Messages from Partition n
This example uses the -o
flag to read from a specified offset. Specifying -3
allows retrieval of the last 3 messages. The -p
option targets partition 0
:
kafkacat -C -b kafka -t mytopic -o -3 -e -p 0