kcat Command Examples

Apache Kafka producer and consumer tool. More information: https://github.com/edenhill/kcat.

• 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}}