Kafka on macOS

Generally I run everything in Docker: it's less fiddly, and I can do a clean uninstall very easily. Alas Docker networking is different, and changes every few months as Docker makes things easier... by changing the networking.

As of July 2018 here's the easiest way I've found to run Kafka on macOS:

brew install kafka kafkacat zookeeper
brew services start zookeeper
brew services start kafka

Once Kafka is up, list out the brokers:

$ kafkacat -L -b localhost
Metadata for all topics (from broker -1: localhost:9092/bootstrap):
 1 brokers:
  broker 0 at 192.168.0.133:9092
 0 topics:

Now let's go to the mysterious directory that has tons of good tools. Create a topic, then use "kafkacat" again to verify our new topic has been created:

$ cd /usr/local/Cellar/kafka/*/libexec/bin
./kafka-topics.sh --create  --topic example-topic --zookeeper localhost:2181 --partitions 1 --replication-factor 1

$ kafkacat -L -b localhost
Metadata for all topics (from broker -1: localhost:9092/bootstrap):
 1 brokers:
  broker 0 at 192.168.0.133:9092
 1 topics:
  topic "example-topic" with 1 partitions:
    partition 0, leader 0, replicas: 0, isrs: 0

Woot! My thanks to springheeledjak and pkafel!