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Apache Kafka is a popular distributed message broker designed to efficiently handle large volumes of real-time data. A Kafka cluster is not only highly scalable and fault-tolerant, but it also has a much higher throughput compared to other message brokers such as ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. Though it is generally used as a publish/subscribe messaging system, a lot of organizations also use it for log aggregation because it offers persistent storage for published messages.
A publish/subscribe messaging system allows one or more producers to publish messages without considering the number of consumers or how they will process the messages. Subscribed clients are notified automatically about updates and the creation of new messages. This system is more efficient and scalable than systems where clients poll periodically to determine if new messages are available.
In this tutorial, you will install and use Apache Kafka 2.1.1 on Debian 9.
To follow along, you will need:
Since Kafka can handle requests over a network, you should create a dedicated user for it. This minimizes damage to your Debian machine should the Kafka server be compromised. We will create a dedicated kafka user in this step, but you should create a different non-root user to perform other tasks on this server once you have finished setting up Kafka.
Logged in as your non-root sudo user, create a user called kafka with the useradd
command:
- sudo useradd kafka -m
The -m
flag ensures that a home directory will be created for the user. This home directory, /home/kafka
, will act as our workspace directory for executing commands in the sections below.
Set the password using passwd
:
- sudo passwd kafka
Add the kafka user to the sudo
group with the adduser
command, so that it has the privileges required to install Kafka’s dependencies:
- sudo adduser kafka sudo
Your kafka user is now ready. Log into this account using su
:
- su -l kafka
Now that we’ve created the Kafka-specific user, we can move on to downloading and extracting the Kafka binaries.
Let’s download and extract the Kafka binaries into dedicated folders in our kafka user’s home directory.
To start, create a directory in /home/kafka
called Downloads
to store your downloads:
- mkdir ~/Downloads
Install curl
using apt-get
so that you’ll be able to download remote files:
- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y curl
Once curl
is installed, use it to download the Kafka binaries:
- curl "https://www.apache.org/dist/kafka/2.1.1/kafka_2.11-2.1.1.tgz" -o ~/Downloads/kafka.tgz
Create a directory called kafka
and change to this directory. This will be the base directory of the Kafka installation:
- mkdir ~/kafka && cd ~/kafka
Extract the archive you downloaded using the tar
command:
- tar -xvzf ~/Downloads/kafka.tgz --strip 1
We specify the --strip 1
flag to ensure that the archive’s contents are extracted in ~/kafka/
itself and not in another directory (such as ~/kafka/kafka_2.11-2.1.1/
) inside of it.
Now that we’ve downloaded and extracted the binaries successfully, we can move on to configuring Kafka to allow for topic deletion.
Kafka’s default behavior will not allow us to delete a topic, the category, group, or feed name to which messages can be published. To modify this, let’s edit the configuration file.
Kafka’s configuration options are specified in server.properties
. Open this file with nano
or your favorite editor:
- nano ~/kafka/config/server.properties
Let’s add a setting that will allow us to delete Kafka topics. Add the following to the bottom of the file:
delete.topic.enable = true
Save the file, and exit nano
. Now that we’ve configured Kafka, we can move on to creating systemd unit files for running and enabling it on startup.
In this section, we will create systemd unit files for the Kafka service. This will help us perform common service actions such as starting, stopping, and restarting Kafka in a manner consistent with other Linux services.
ZooKeeper is a service that Kafka uses to manage its cluster state and configurations. It is commonly used in many distributed systems as an integral component. If you would like to know more about it, visit the official ZooKeeper docs.
Create the unit file for zookeeper
:
- sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/zookeeper.service
Enter the following unit definition into the file:
[Unit]
Requires=network.target remote-fs.target
After=network.target remote-fs.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=kafka
ExecStart=/home/kafka/kafka/bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh /home/kafka/kafka/config/zookeeper.properties
ExecStop=/home/kafka/kafka/bin/zookeeper-server-stop.sh
Restart=on-abnormal
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The [Unit]
section specifies that ZooKeeper requires networking and the filesystem to be ready before it can start.
The [Service]
section specifies that systemd should use the zookeeper-server-start.sh
and zookeeper-server-stop.sh
shell files for starting and stopping the service. It also specifies that ZooKeeper should be restarted automatically if it exits abnormally.
Next, create the systemd service file for kafka
:
- sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/kafka.service
Enter the following unit definition into the file:
[Unit]
Requires=zookeeper.service
After=zookeeper.service
[Service]
Type=simple
User=kafka
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c '/home/kafka/kafka/bin/kafka-server-start.sh /home/kafka/kafka/config/server.properties > /home/kafka/kafka/kafka.log 2>&1'
ExecStop=/home/kafka/kafka/bin/kafka-server-stop.sh
Restart=on-abnormal
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The [Unit]
section specifies that this unit file depends on zookeeper.service
. This will ensure that zookeeper
gets started automatically when the kafka
service starts.
The [Service]
section specifies that systemd should use the kafka-server-start.sh
and kafka-server-stop.sh
shell files for starting and stopping the service. It also specifies that Kafka should be restarted automatically if it exits abnormally.
Now that the units have been defined, start Kafka with the following command:
- sudo systemctl start kafka
To ensure that the server has started successfully, check the journal logs for the kafka
unit:
- sudo journalctl -u kafka
You should see output similar to the following:
OutputMar 23 13:31:48 kafka systemd[1]: Started kafka.service.
You now have a Kafka server listening on port 9092
.
While we have started the kafka
service, if we were to reboot our server, it would not be started automatically. To enable kafka
on server boot, run:
- sudo systemctl enable kafka
Now that we’ve started and enabled the services, let’s check the installation.
Let’s publish and consume a “Hello World” message to make sure the Kafka server is behaving correctly. Publishing messages in Kafka requires:
First, create a topic named TutorialTopic
by typing:
- ~/kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic TutorialTopic
You can create a producer from the command line using the kafka-console-producer.sh
script. It expects the Kafka server’s hostname, port, and a topic name as arguments.
Publish the string "Hello, World"
to the TutorialTopic
topic by typing:
- echo "Hello, World" | ~/kafka/bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic TutorialTopic > /dev/null
Next, you can create a Kafka consumer using the kafka-console-consumer.sh
script. It expects the ZooKeeper server’s hostname and port, along with a topic name as arguments.
The following command consumes messages from TutorialTopic
. Note the use of the --from-beginning
flag, which allows the consumption of messages that were published before the consumer was started:
- ~/kafka/bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic TutorialTopic --from-beginning
If there are no configuration issues, you should see Hello, World
in your terminal:
OutputHello, World
The script will continue to run, waiting for more messages to be published to the topic. Feel free to open a new terminal and start a producer to publish a few more messages. You should be able to see them all in the consumer’s output.
When you are done testing, press CTRL+C
to stop the consumer script. Now that we have tested the installation, let’s move on to installing KafkaT.
KafkaT is a tool from Airbnb that makes it easier for you to view details about your Kafka cluster and perform certain administrative tasks from the command line. Because it is a Ruby gem, you will need Ruby to use it. You will also need the build-essential
package to be able to build the other gems it depends on. Install them using apt
:
- sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev build-essential
You can now install KafkaT using the gem command:
- sudo gem install kafkat
KafkaT uses .kafkatcfg
as the configuration file to determine the installation and log directories of your Kafka server. It should also have an entry pointing KafkaT to your ZooKeeper instance.
Create a new file called .kafkatcfg
:
- nano ~/.kafkatcfg
Add the following lines to specify the required information about your Kafka server and Zookeeper instance:
{
"kafka_path": "~/kafka",
"log_path": "/tmp/kafka-logs",
"zk_path": "localhost:2181"
}
You are now ready to use KafkaT. For a start, here’s how you would use it to view details about all Kafka partitions:
- kafkat partitions
You will see the following output:
OutputTopic Partition Leader Replicas ISRs
TutorialTopic 0 0 [0] [0]
__consumer_offsets 0 0 [0] [0]
...
...
You will see TutorialTopic
, as well as __consumer_offsets
, an internal topic used by Kafka for storing client-related information. You can safely ignore lines starting with __consumer_offsets
.
To learn more about KafkaT, refer to its GitHub repository.
If you want to create a multi-broker cluster using more Debian 9 machines, you should repeat Step 1, Step 4, and Step 5 on each of the new machines. Additionally, you should make the following changes in the server.properties
file for each:
The value of the broker.id
property should be changed such that it is unique throughout the cluster. This property uniquely identifies each server in the cluster and can have any string as its value. For example, "server1"
, "server2"
, etc.
The value of the zookeeper.connect
property should be changed such that all nodes point to the same ZooKeeper instance. This property specifies the ZooKeeper instance’s address and follows the <HOSTNAME/IP_ADDRESS>:<PORT>
format. For example, "203.0.113.0:2181"
, "203.0.113.1:2181"
etc.
If you want to have multiple ZooKeeper instances for your cluster, the value of the zookeeper.connect
property on each node should be an identical, comma-separated string listing the IP addresses and port numbers of all the ZooKeeper instances.
Now that all of the installations are done, you can remove the kafka user’s admin privileges. Before you do so, log out and log back in as any other non-root sudo user. If you are still running the same shell session you started this tutorial with, simply type exit
.
Remove the kafka user from the sudo group:
- sudo deluser kafka sudo
To further improve your Kafka server’s security, lock the kafka user’s password using the passwd
command. This makes sure that nobody can directly log into the server using this account:
- sudo passwd kafka -l
At this point, only root or a sudo user can log in as kafka
by typing in the following command:
- sudo su - kafka
In the future, if you want to unlock it, use passwd
with the -u
option:
- sudo passwd kafka -u
You have now successfully restricted the kafka user’s admin privileges.
You now have Apache Kafka running securely on your Debian server. You can make use of it in your projects by creating Kafka producers and consumers using Kafka clients, which are available for most programming languages. To learn more about Kafka, you can also consult its documentation.
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