Lecstor's Blog

Kafka/Protobuf Cheatsheet

January 30, 2019

Tools for working with Kafka and Protobufs - all about dumping messages to the console at this point.

Kafkacat

https://medium.com/@coderunner/debugging-with-kafkacat-df7851d21968

Install

$ brew install kafkacat --with-yajl

list topics

$ kafkacat -L -b localhost:9092

publish

$ kafkacat -P -b localhost:9092 -t awesome-topic
...type or paste message...

consume

print everything

$ kafkacat -C -b localhost:9092 -t awesome-topic

print only messages

$ kafkacat -C -b localhost:9092 -t awesome-topic -p

Protoc

http://google.github.io/proto-lens/installing-protoc.html

Install

$ brew install protobuf

KafkaCat & Protoc

https://github.com/edenhill/kafkacat/issues/72

The solution in the above issue didn’t quite work for me, I needed to add the -e option to get kafkacat to exit before protoc would dump the messages.

This means that you don’t get the desired tail/follow functionality but it’s still usable enough with a little extra effort to set the offset.

decode any Type of protobuf message and dump raw values

$ kafkacat -C -b localhost:9092 -t awesome-topic -o beginning -D "" -e | protoc --decode_raw
% Reached end of topic awesome-topic [0] at offset 201: exiting
...messages...
$ kafkacat -C -b localhost:9092 -t awesome-topic -o 201 -D "" -e | protoc --decode_raw
% Reached end of topic awesome-topic [0] at offset 321: exiting
...new messages...

decode specifc Types of protobuf messages and dump pretty values

(bugga, it only dumps the last mesage..)

$ kafkacat -C -b localhost -t awesome-topic -D "" -e | protoc --decode=my.message.Type \
--proto_path=./path/to/proto/files My.proto

Written by Jason Galea from Cairns, Australia.

Full Stack developer specialising in React and NodeJS.

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