Cloudera Docs

Command Line Tools

Kafka command line tools overview.

In some situations, it is convenient to use the command line tools available in Kafka to administer your cluster. However, it is important to note that not all tools available for Kafka are supported by Cloudera. Moreover, certain administration tasks can be carried out more easily and conveniently using Cloudera Manager.

When administering Kafka with command line tools, be aware of the following:

  • Use Cloudera Manager to start and stop Kafka and Zookeeper services. Do not use the kafka-server-start, kafka-server-stop, zookeeper-server-start, or zookeeper-server-stop commands.
  • For a parcel installation, all Kafka command line tools are located in /opt/cloudera/parcels/KAFKA/lib/kafka/bin/. For a package installation, all such tools can be found in /usr/bin/.
  • Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to your JDK installation directory before using the command-line tools. For example: 
    
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.8.0_144-cloudera
  • Using any Zookeeper command manually can be very difficult to get right when it comes to interaction with Kafka. Cloudera recommends that you avoid doing any write operations or ACL modifications in Zookeeper.
  • In a FIPS-enabled cluster that is running JDK 11, you must set various JVM arguments in your shell environment before running any of the Kafka CLI tools. For more information, see Configuring Kafka command line tools in FIPS clusters.