Working with Kafka from the Command Line

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Working with Kafka from the Command Line

In this lesson, we will have the opportunity to work with a real Kafka cluster using the command line tools provided through Kafka. Ultimately, Kafka makes it easy to build applications that interact with the Kafka cluster, but it also provides some command line tools. We can use these to create ad-hoc producers and consumers, plus perform a variety of administrative tasks that require you to interact with the cluster.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 13, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Create a Kafka Topic for the Inventory Purchase Data

Create the topic using the kafka-topics command:

kafka-topics --create --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --replication-factor 3 --partitions 6 --topic inventory_purchases

Challenge

Test the Setup by Publishing and Consuming Some Data
1. Start a command line producer:
```
kafka-console-producer --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic inventory_purchases
```
1. Type in a few lines of test data. Since we are working with merely test data, a specific format is not required. It could look like this:
```
product: apples, quantity: 5
product: lemons, quantity: 7
```
1. Once the test messages are published, we can exit the producer.
2. Start up a command line consumer:
```
kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic inventory_purchases --from-beginning
```
1. We should see the test messages that were published earlier:
```
product: apples, quantity: 5
product: lemons, quantity: 7
```

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