How To Install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Kafka is a distributed message agent designed to deal with huge volumes of real-time information effectively. Unlike traditional agents like ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, Kafka functions as a bunch of one or more servers that make it highly scalable and because of the distributed nature, it’s inbuilt fault-tolerance whilst providing greater throughput when compared to its counterparts.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Apache Kafka on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Java.

Apache Kafka requires Java to be installed on your server. By default, Java is not available in Ubuntu’s repository. Add the Oracle Java PPA to Apt with the following command:

add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update -y
apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Verify the Java version by running the following command:

java -version

Step 3. Installing Zookeeper.

Apache Kafka depends on Zookeeper for cluster management. Hence, prior to starting Kafka, Zookeeper has to be started:

apt-get install zookeeperd

After the installation completes, ZooKeeper will be started as a daemon automatically. By default, it will listen on port 2181:

netstat -ant | grep :2181

You can run the following command to check whether the zookeeper is running:

systemctl status zookeeper

Step 4. Download and Installing Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

First, download and extract Kafka from the Apache website. You can use wget to download Kafka:

wget http://www-us.apache.org/dist/kafka/1.1.0/kafka_2.12-1.1.0.tgz

Then extract the archive file:

tar xzf kafka_2.12-1.1.0.tgz
mv kafka_2.12-1.1.0 /usr/local/kafka

Start Kafka Server:

cd /usr/local/kafka
bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

Now start the Kafka server:

bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties

...
[2018-06-26 10:59:45,989] INFO Kafka version : 1.0.1 (org.apache.kafka.common.utils.AppInfoParser)
[2018-06-26 10:59:45,995] INFO Kafka commitId : c0518aa65f25317e (org.apache.kafka.common.utils.AppInfoParser)
[2018-06-26 10:59:46,006] INFO [KafkaServer id=0] started (kafka.server.KafkaServer)

Step 5. Create a Topic on Kafka.

Let’s create a topic named “NewTopic” with a single partition and only one replica:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic NewTopic
Created topic "NewTopic".

Now you can see the created topic on Kafka by running the list topic command:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181
NewTopic

Step 6. Send Messages to Kafka.

The “producer” is the process responsible for put data into our Kafka. The Kafka comes with a command-line client that will take input from a file or from standard input and send it out as messages to the Kafka cluster:

Let’s run the producer and then type a few messages into the console to send to the server:

bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic NewTopic

>Welcome to kafka
>This is my new topic
>

Step 7. Using Kafka Consumer.

Kafka also has a command-line consumer to read data from the Kafka cluster and display messages to standard output:

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic NewTopic --from-beginning

Welcome to kafka
This is my new topic

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Apache Kafka. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Apache Kafka website.