kitz

your Kafka desk clerk

A terminal UI for AWS MSK with first-class IAM auth, multi-environment switching, and live topic / consumer-group inspection. The wedge no other Kafka TUI has: kitz authenticates to MSK with your ~/.aws creds (SASL OAUTHBEARER / SigV4) — no broker-string, cert, or JAAS juggling.

⚠️ Work in progress · macOS only for now. Linux/Windows builds are planned. The prebuilt macOS binary is fully self-contained (librdkafka and OpenSSL are baked in) — nothing to install alongside it.

Features

• IAM-native auth - connects to MSK with your AWS credentials; plaintext and plain-TLS clusters supported too (auth = "iam" | "tls" | "plaintext").
• Environment hot-switch - 1–9 to jump between stag / preprod / prod / regression without restarting. Prod is tagged red with a delete guardrail.
• Bird's-eye dashboard - Topics, live Config/Detail (flip with f), an incoming-events graph, and an activity Log - all at once.
• Detail - partitions, ISR/replicas, watermarks, ~event count, and the consumer groups actually subscribed to the topic.
• Peek - browse recent events with pretty-printed JSON; copy payload/key.
• Consumer groups - full-screen view (G); delete with confirmation.
• Admin - create topic, add partitions, delete topic/group.
• kitz doctor <env> - layer-by-layer connectivity diagnosis.

Install

Prebuilt binary (recommended) - no dependencies, nothing to compile:

# npm
npm install -g @harry-kp/kitz

# Homebrew
brew install Harry-kp/tap/kitz

# curl
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Harry-kp/kitz/releases/latest/download/kitz-installer.sh | sh

These ship a self-contained macOS binary - librdkafka and OpenSSL are baked in, so there's nothing else to install.

From source (cargo install) compiles librdkafka, so it needs cmake + Xcode Command Line Tools:

brew install cmake
cargo install kitz

Quick start

cp kitz.toml.example kitz.toml   # then edit: your brokers, regions, auth
export AWS_PROFILE=your-profile    # or set aws_profile per-env in the toml
kitz

kitz.toml (also read from ~/.config/kitz/config.toml):

[[env]]
name = "stag"
bootstrap = "b-1.mycluster.xxxxx.kafka.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com:9092"
region = "eu-central-1"
auth = "plaintext"   # 9092=plaintext · 9094=tls · 9098=iam
prod = false

Note: MSK brokers are usually private VPC IPs - run kitz somewhere that can route to them (on the VPC's VPN, or a bastion inside the VPC). Stuck? kitz doctor <env> tells you whether it's network, creds, or protocol.

Keys

Key	Action
1–9 / e	switch environment
⇥ / h l	move focus between panes
↑↓ / j k	navigate · g jump top
f	flip Detail ⟷ Config
w	event counts + live graph
p	peek events (y/Y copy)
y	copy selected topic name
/	filter topics
c / a / d	create / add-partitions / delete topic
G	consumer groups
x	actions menu · ? help · q quit

Building from source

kitz links librdkafka (built from source via cmake):

brew install cmake        # macOS
cargo build --release

License

MIT © Harry KP