How to Install Kafka on Alpine Linux Latest

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is used to build real-time data streaming pipelines and applications. Kafka is written in Java and can be run on any operating system that supports Java. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Kafka on Alpine Linux Latest.

Prerequisites

Before we start installing Kafka, make sure that you have the following prerequisites in place:

An Alpine Linux Latest instance with minimum 2GB of RAM.
OpenJDK 8 or later version
Zookeeper

Step 1: Install Java

Kafka requires Java 8 or later to run. We can install OpenJDK 8 by running the following command:

apk add openjdk8

Once installed, we can check the version using the following command:

java -version

Step 2: Install Zookeeper

Kafka uses Zookeeper to manage and coordinate Kafka brokers. We can install Zookeeper by running the following command:

apk add zookeeper

Once installed, we can start and enable the Zookeeper service using the following command:

rc-service zookeeper start
rc-update add zookeeper

Step 3: Download and Install Kafka

We can download and install the latest stable version of Kafka from their official website:

wget https://www-eu.apache.org/dist/kafka/2.8.1/kafka_2.12-2.8.1.tgz

Next, we can extract the downloaded file and move it to the /opt directory using the following commands:

tar xvzf kafka_2.12-2.8.1.tgz
sudo mv kafka_2.12-2.8.1 /opt/kafka

Step 4: Configure Kafka

We can configure Kafka by editing the server.properties file. We can use the default configuration provided by Kafka by copying the sample configuration file provided:

mkdir -p /opt/kafka/data/kafka
sudo cp /opt/kafka/config/server.properties /opt/kafka/config/server.properties.orig
sudo nano /opt/kafka/config/server.properties

Next, we need to make the following changes to the configuration file:

#advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://your.hostname.com:9092
advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://localhost:9092

#log.dirs=/tmp/kafka-logs
log.dirs=/opt/kafka/data/kafka

Uncomment the advertised.listeners line and set it to PLAINTEXT://localhost:9092.

Also, set the log.dirs to /opt/kafka/data/kafka.

Step 5: Start Kafka

We can start the Kafka broker by running the following command:

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

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to install Kafka on Alpine Linux Latest. We also learned how to install Java, Zookeeper, download and install Kafka, configure Kafka, and start the Kafka broker. Kafka is now ready to use for real-time data streaming applications.