• This library is primarily documented through examples in its API documentation.
• Documentation about Kafka itself can be found at its project home page.

This crate works with Cargo and is on crates.io. The API is currently under heavy movement although we do follow semantic versioning (but expect the version number to grow quickly.)

[dependencies]
kafka = "0.5"

To build kafka-rust you'll need libsnappy-dev on your local machine. If that library is not installed in the usual path, you can export the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_RUN_PATH environment variables before issueing cargo build.

Alternatively, support for various features, including snappy, can be turned off at compile time. See kafka-rust's Cargo.toml and cargo's documentation.

kafka-rust is tested against Kafka 0.8.2.x and regularly used against Kafka 0.9 servers. However, efforts to implement support for new features from the Kafka 0.9 release are just in their beginnings.

As mentioned, the cargo generated documentation constains some examples. Further, standalone, compilable example programs are provided in the examples directory of the repository.

This is a higher-level Consumer API for Kafka. It provides convenient offset management support on behalf of a specified group. This is the API a client application of this library wants to use for receiving messages from Kafka.

This is a higher-level Producer API for Kafka. It provides convenient automatic partition assignment capabilities through partitioners. This is the API a client application of this library wants to use for sending messsages to Kafka.

KafkaClient is the central point of this API. However, this is a mid-level abstraction for Kafka rather suitable for building higher-level APIs. Application's typically want to use the already mentioned Consumers and Producers. Nevertheless, KafkaClient's main methods are:

• Loading metadata
• Fetching topic offsets
• Sending messages
• Fetching messages
• Committing a consumer group's offsets
• Fetching a consumer group's offsets

There's still a lot of room for improvements on kafka-rust. Not everything works right at the moment. Have a look into the issue tracker and feel free to contribute by reporting new problems or contributing to existing ones. Any constructive contribution is warmly wellcome!

As usually with open source, don't hesitate to fork the repo and submit a pull requests if you see something to be changed. We'll be happy see kafka-rust improving over time.

Note unless otherwise explicitely stated in the documentation, this library will ignore requests to topics which it doesn't know about. In particular it will not try to retrieve messages from non-existing/unknown topics. (This behavior is very likely to change in future version of this library.)

Given a local kafka server installation you can create topics if the following command (kafka-topics.sh is part of the Kafka distribution):

kafka-topics.sh --topic my-topic --create --zookeeper localhost:2181  --partition 1 --replication-factor 1