kcat: Apache Kafka producer and consumer tool

kcat is Apache Kafka producer and consumer tool.

Consume messages starting with the newest offset:

kcat -C -t topic -b brokers

Consume messages starting with the oldest offset and exit after the last message is received:

kcat -C -t topic -b brokers -o beginning -e

Consume messages as a Kafka consumer group:

kcat -G group_id topic -b brokers

Publish message by reading from stdin:

echo message | kcat -P -t topic -b brokers

Publish messages by reading from a file:

kcat -P -t topic -b brokers path/to/file

List metadata for all topics and brokers:

kcat -L -b brokers

List metadata for a specific topic:

kcat -L -t topic -b brokers

Get offset for a topic/partition for a specific point in time:

kcat -Q -t topic:partition:unix_timestamp -b brokers

More information: https://github.com/edenhill/kcat .

I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you know a person who can benefit from this information, send them a link of this post. If you want to get notified about new posts, follow me on YouTube , Twitter (x) , LinkedIn , and GitHub .