Lab
Cloud

Exporting Data to a File with Kafka Connect

Kafka Connect provides several connectors to help you move data to and from a variety of external sources. In this lab, you will implement a basic connector to copy Kafka data to a file on the local disk. This simple exercise will give you some hands-on experience interacting with Kafka Connect, and this introduction will prepare you to work with more advanced use cases.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

30m

Last updated

Sep 03, 2025

Challenge

Create a Connector to Export Data from the `inventory_purchases` Topic to a File

Create a FileStreamSinkConnector:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8083/connectors -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
  "name": "file_sink",
  "config": {
    "connector.class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.file.FileStreamSinkConnector",
    "tasks.max": "1",
    "file": "/home/cloud_user/output/output.txt",
    "topics": "inventory_purchases",
    "key.converter": "org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.StringConverter",
    "value.converter": "org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.StringConverter"
  }
}'

We should see data from the topic appearing in the output file:

cat /home/cloud_user/output/output.txt

Challenge

Publish a New Purchase of Plums to the `inventory_purchases` Topic
1. Start up a console producer:
```
kafka-console-producer --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic inventory_purchases
```
1. Publish some data representing a purchase of plums:
```
plums:5
```
1. Check the file and verify that the purchase of plums shows up in the file data:
```
cat /home/cloud_user/output/output.txt
```
Note: It may take a few moments for the connector to process the new data.

Author

Pluralsight Skills

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