The Kafka source connector pulls messages from Kafka topics and persists the messages to Pulsar topics. For more information about connectors, see Connector Overview. This document introduces how to get started with creating a Kafka source connector and get it up and running.

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Quick start

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Prerequisites

The prerequisites for connecting an Kafka source connector to external systems include: Apache Kafka: Ensure you have a running Kafka instance. You can follow the official Kafka Quickstart guide to set up a Kafka instance if you don’t have one already.

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1. Create a connector

The following command shows how to use pulsarctl to create a builtin connector. If you want to create a non-builtin connector, you need to replace --source-type kafka with --archive /path/to/pulsar-io-kafka.nar. You can find the button to download the nar package at the beginning of the document.
If you are a StreamNative Cloud user, you need set up your environment first.
pulsarctl sources create \
  --source-type kafka \
  --name kafka-source \
  --tenant public \
  --namespace default \
  --destination-topic-name "Your topic name" \
  --parallelism 1 \
  --source-config \
  '{
    "bootstrapServers": "localhost:9092",
    "topic": "kafka-topic-name",
    "groupId": "group-id"
  }'
The --source-config is the minimum necessary configuration for starting this connector, and it is a JSON string. You need to substitute the relevant parameters with your own. If you want to configure more parameters, see Configuration Properties for reference.
You can also choose to use a variety of other tools to create a connector:

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2. Send messages to the Kafka topic

You can send the message using the command line: 
$ bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list localhost:9092 --topic kafka-topic-name
> hello pulsar

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3. Check the data on Pulsar topic

You can consume the data from the Pulsar topic using the command: 
$ bin/pulsar-client consume --subscription-name my-subscription pulsar-topic-name -n 0
If everything is set up correctly, you should see the message “hello pulsar” in the Pulsar consumer.

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Configuration Properties

This table outlines the properties of a Kafka source connector.
NameTypeRequiredDefaultDescription
bootstrapServersStringtrue” ” (empty string)A comma-separated list of host and port pairs for establishing the initial connection to the Kafka cluster.
groupIdStringtrue” ” (empty string)A unique string that identifies the group of consumer processes to which this consumer belongs.
fetchMinByteslongfalse1The minimum byte expected for each fetch response.
autoCommitEnabledbooleanfalsetrueIf set to true, the consumer’s offset is periodically committed in the background.

This committed offset is used when the process fails as the position from which a new consumer begins.
autoCommitIntervalMslongfalse5000The frequency in milliseconds that the consumer offsets are auto-committed to Kafka if autoCommitEnabled is set to true.
heartbeatIntervalMslongfalse3000The interval between heartbeats to the consumer when using Kafka’s group management facilities.

Note: heartbeatIntervalMs must be smaller than sessionTimeoutMs.
sessionTimeoutMslongfalse30000The timeout used to detect consumer failures when using Kafka’s group management facility.
topicStringtrue” ” (empty string)The Kafka topic that sends messages to Pulsar.
consumerConfigPropertiesMapfalse” ” (empty string)The consumer configuration properties to be passed to consumers.

Note: other properties specified in the connector configuration file take precedence over this configuration.
keyDeserializationClassStringfalseorg.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializerThe deserializer class for Kafka consumers to deserialize keys.
The deserializer is set by a specific implementation of KafkaAbstractSource.
valueDeserializationClassStringfalseorg.apache.kafka.common.serialization.ByteArrayDeserializerThe deserializer class for Kafka consumers to deserialize values.
autoOffsetResetStringfalseearliestThe default offset reset policy.