Setting up, Installing and Starting the Kafka server on MacOS

Apache Kafka is a popular distributed streaming platform that you can install and run on your MacBook. Below are the detailed steps to set up, install, and start Kafka on your MacBook:

Step 1 —

Download Apache Kafka

• Open your web browser and go to the Apache Kafka download page: https://kafka.apache.org/downloads
• Download the latest version of Kafka (e.g., kafka_2.13–3.5.0.tgz) for Scala 2.13.

Step 2 -

Extract Kafka

• Open Terminal.
• Navigate to the directory where you downloaded Kafka
• Extract and Unzip the downloaded kafka using below command —

tar -xzf kafka_2.13–3.5.0.tgz

Step 3 —

Start Zookeeper

• Zookeeper is mandatory in the kafka cluster and broker(server) will not be started if zookeeper is unavailable.
• Open the terminal and Navigate to the Kafka directory:

cd kafka_2.13–3.5.0

Command to start the zookeeper ->

bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

Step 4 —

Start Kafka server

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a. Open new Terminal and navigate to the kafka directory.

b. Run the following command to start Kafka server:

bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties

This will start the Kafka broker, and it will be ready to receive and process messages.

Bonus! Various handy kafka related commands.

a. Command to know kafka version — →

bin/kafka-broker-api-versions.sh --version

b. Create Topic ->

bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --topic cities --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

c. To List all the Topics ->

bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

d. To Describe a Topic ->

bin/kafka-topics.sh --describe --topic cities --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

e. Producing messages to the topic ->

bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --topic cities --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

f. Consuming messages using Kafka console Consumer — — >

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --topic cities --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

g. To consume all the messages from the beginning ->

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --topic cities --from-beginning --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

h. Run the following command to create a Kafka topic named “test-topic” with 1 partition and a replication factor of 1:

kafka-topics --create --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic test-topic

i. To stop the Kafka server, you can use the kafka-server-stop command in a new Terminal window.