Kowl

Kowl is a Web UI for Apache Kafka that allows exploring messages, consumers, configurations and more with a focus on a good UI & UX.

Support Apple M1

Quick Start

Do you just want to test Kowl against one of your Kafka clusters without spending too much time on the test setup? Here are some docker commands that allow you to run it locally against an existing Kafka cluster:

Kafka is running locally

Since Kowl runs in it's own container (which has it's own network scope), we have to use host.docker.internal as bootstrap server. That DNS resolves to the host system's ip address. However since Kafka brokers send a list of all brokers' DNS when a client has connected, you have to make sure your advertised listener is connected accordingly, e.g.: PLAINTEXT://host.docker.internal:9092

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e KAFKA_BROKERS=host.docker.internal:9092 rsmnarts/kowl

Docker supports the --network=host option only on Linux. So Linux users use localhost:9092 as advertised listener and use the host network namespace instead. Kowl will then be ran as it would be executed on the host machine.

docker run --rm --network=host -p 8080:8080 -e KAFKA_BROKERS=localhost:9092 rsmnarts/kowl

Kafka is running remotely

Protected via SASL_SSL and trusted certificates (e.g. Confluent Cloud):

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e KAFKA_BROKERS=pkc-4r000.europe-west1.gcp.confluent.cloud:9092 -e KAFKA_TLS_ENABLED=true -e KAFKA_SASL_ENABLED=true -e KAFKA_SASL_USERNAME=xxx -e KAFKA_SASL_PASSWORD=xxx rsmnarts/kowl