How can you run Kafka Topology Builder

Kafka Topology Builder is available to be integrated using different artifacts:

• As a CLI tool, available to be installed using rpm, deb and tar.gz packages from github.
• As a docker image, available from docker hub.

NOTE: In the future it will also be available as a jar to be integrated in other libraries.

Running KTB as a CLI command

If you are using the CLI tool, you an use the –help command to list the different options available.

$> kafka-topology-builder.sh  --help
    usage: cli
      --allowDelete          Permits delete operations for topics and
                             configs. (deprecated, to be removed)
      --brokers <arg>        The Apache Kafka server(s) to connect to.
      --clientConfig <arg>   The AdminClient configuration file.
      --dryRun               Print the execution plan without altering
                              anything.
      --help                 Prints usage information.
      --quiet                Print minimum status update
      --topology <arg>       Topology config file.
      --version              Prints useful version information.

The most important ones are:

• –brokers: This is an optional parameter where the user can list the target Kafka cluster urls.
• –clientConfig: As other tools, the Kafka Topology Builder needs it’s own configuration. In this parameter users can pass a file listing all different personalisation options.
• –dryRun: When as a user, you don’t want to run the tool, but instead see what might happen. This option is very useful to evaluate changes before applying them to the cluster.
• –topology: This is where you will pass the topology file. It can be either a single file, or a directory. If a directory is used, all files within are going to be compiled into a single macro topology.
• –version: If you wanna know the version you are running.
• –allowDelete: By default the KTB will not make any destructive operations. If as a user, you allow the tool to update the cluster,

for example by deleting unnecessary ACLs, or topics, you need to pass this option.

Running the KTB as a docker image.

As explained earlier, users can run the tool as well directly as docker images. An example command for this function will look like this:

$> docker run -t -i \
      -v /Users/pere/work/kafka-topology-builder/example:/example \
      purbon/kafka-topology-builder:latest \
      kafka-topology-builder.sh \
      --brokers pkc-4ygn6.europe-west3.gcp.confluent.cloud:9092 \
      --clientConfig /example/topology-builder-with-schema-cloud.properties \
      --topology /example/descriptor.yaml -quiet

CLI options are all available here. Available image tags can be found at docker hub.