KAFKACAT(1)

📦 version 1.6.0, in ubuntu jammy

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the kafkacat manual page 💖 and yes, the manual name is right there in the title, we're not re-typing the header line, we're folding it in, keep up 🫶

  • kafkacat — generic producer and consumer for Apache Kafka

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

here's the shape of it, no cap, copy it exactly:

kafkacat -C | -P | -L -t topic [-p partition] -b brokers [, ...]
         [-D delim] [-K delim] [-c cnt] [-X list] [-X prop=val]
         [-X dump] [-d dbg [, ...]] [-q] [-v] [-Z] [specific options]
kafkacat -C [generic options] [-o offset] [-e] [-O] [-u] [-J]
         [-f fmtstr]
kafkacat -P [generic options] [-z snappy | gzip] [-p -1] [file [...]]
kafkacat -L [generic options] [-t topic]

four whole moods, pick your fighter 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

kafkacat is a generic non-JVM producer and consumer for Apache Kafka 0.8. think of it as netcat for Kafka 🔥 like, it's giving "what if the vibe was just raw pipes but for a distributed log", and honestly? iconic. no JVM. no cap. ✨

In producer mode ( -P ), kafkacat reads messages from stdin, delimited with a configurable delimiter, and produces them to the Kafka cluster, topic and partition you handed it. in consumer mode ( -C ), it reads messages from a topic and partition and prints them to stdout using the configured message delimiter. 🎀

If neither -P or -C is specified, kafkacat attempts to figure out the mode automatically based on stdin/stdout tty types. it just knows. main character energy, fr fr 👑

kafkacat also features a metadata list mode ( -L ), to display the current state of the Kafka cluster and its topics and partitions. it's the "let me see what's going on in here" mode and lowkey we're obsessed 💜

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

For a more extensive help and some simple examples, run kafkacat with the -h flag. seriously, do it, it ate 💅

not me writing a whole manpage and still being the friend who tells you to read the -h flag 🙈

okay and for the cute sign-off: this whole thing comes to you from the Debian crew 🍓, and the page itself is dated December 09, 2014. old but gold, still slaying ⭐🧚💖

📦 where this page comes from