Streaming Text Files to Kafka

Use Case Overview

In this use case, we use Brooklin to create datastreams to publish text file content to a locally deployed instance of Apache Kafka.

Use Case Summary

• Source: File System
• Destination: Kafka
• Connector: FileConnector
• Transport Provider: KafkaTransportProvider

Instructions

1. Set up Kafka

Follow the instructions on the Apache Kafka Quickstart page to download the Kafka tarball and start a Kafka server locally.

2. Set up Brooklin

1. Download the latest tarball (tgz) from Brooklin releases to a convenient location on your computer.
2. Untar the Brooklin tarball

   tar -xzf brooklin-1.0.0.tgz
   cd brooklin-1.0.0 

3. Run Brooklin

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

3. Create a Datastream

1. Create a datastream to stream the contents of any file of your choice to Kafka.

   # Replace NOTICE below with a file path of your choice or leave it as 
   # is if you would like to use the NOTICE file as an example text file
   bin/brooklin-rest-client.sh -o CREATE -u http://localhost:32311/ -n first-file-datastream -s NOTICE -c file -p 1 -t kafka -m '{"owner":"test-user"}'

   Here are the options we used to create this datastream:

   -o CREATE                      The operation is datastream creation
   -u http://localhost:32311/     Datstream Management Service URI
   -n first-file-datastream       Datastream name
   -s NOTICE                      Datastream source URI (source file path in this case)
   -c file                        Connector name ("file" refers to FileConnector)
   -p 1                           Number of source partitions
   -t kafka                       Transport provider name ("kafka" refers to KafkaTransportProvider)
   -m '{"owner":"test-user"}'     Datastream metadata (specifying datastream owner is mandatory)
   

2. Verify the datastream creation by requesting all datastream metadata from Brooklin.

   bin/brooklin-rest-client.sh -o READALL -u http://localhost:32311/

4. Verify the Data Transfer to Kafka

1. Verify a Kafka topic has been created to hold the data of your newly created datastream. The topic name will have the datastream name (i.e. first-file-datastream) as a prefix.

   cd <kafka-dir>  # Replace with Kafka directory
   bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

2. Print the Kafka topic contents

   # Replace <topic-name> below with name of Kafka topic
   bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic <topic-name> --from-beginning

5. Create More Datastreams

Feel free to create more datastreams to publish more files to Kafka.

6. Stop Brooklin and Kafka

When you are done, run the following commands to stop all running apps.

# Replace <brooklin-dir> and <kafka-dir> with Brooklin and Kafka directories, respectively
<brooklin-dir>/bin/brooklin-server-stop.sh
<kafka-dir>/bin/kafka-server-stop.sh
<kafka-dir>/bin/zookeeper-server-stop.sh