Running Kafka

This is the second step. This recipe shows how to test the Apache Kafka installation.

Getting ready

Go to the Kafka installation directory (/usr/local/kafka/ for Mac users and /opt/kafka/ for Linux users):

> cd /usr/local/kafka

How to do it...

1. First of all, we need to run Zookeeper (sorry, the Kafka dependency on Zookeeper is still very strong):

 zkServer start

You will get the following result:

ZooKeeper JMX enabled by default
Using config: /usr/local/etc/zookeeper/zoo.cfg
Starting zookeeper ... STARTED

2. To check if Zookeeper is running, use the lsof command over the port 9093 (default port):

 > lsof -i :9093

You will get the following output:

COMMAND   PID   USER   FD   TYPE            DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
java   17479 admin1   97u IPv6 0xcfbcde96aa59c3bf     0t0 TCP *:9093 (LISTEN)

3. Now run the Kafka server that comes with the installation; go to /usr/local/kafka/ for Mac users and /opt/kafka/ for Linux users, as follows:

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

Now there is an Apache Kafka broker running on your machine.

There's more...

Remember that Zookeeper must be running on the machine before you start Kafka. If you don't want to start Zookeeper every time you need to run Kafka, install it as an operating system autostart service.

See also

• To experiment in making the Apache Kafka quick start, follow the instructions at https://kafka.apache.org/quickstart