A modern Apacha Kafka client for node.js coupled with Avro support
This library combines Kafka.js and Avsc to provide seamless and unopinionated avro encoding/decoding for your kafka messages using a minimum of dependencies.

Dependencies

• kafkajs
• avsc
• node-fetch

Install

Run npm i -s kafkajs-avro or yarn add kafkajs-avro

Quickstart code

import KafkaAvro from "kafkajs-avro"

(async () {
    const kafka = new KafkaAvro({
        clientId: "<client-id>",
        brokers: ["<hostname>:9092"],
        avro: {
            url: "https://<hostname>:<port>"
        }
    })

    /* Producer */
    const producer = kafka.avro.producer()
    await producer.connect()

    setInterval(() => {
        producer.send({
            topic: "<topic>",
            messages: [{
                subject: "<subject>",
                version: "latest",
                value: { value: 1 }
            }]
        })
    }, 1000)

    /* Consumer */
    const consumer = kafka.avro.consumer({ groupId: "<consumer-group-id>" })
    await consumer.connect()
    await consumer.subscribe({ topic: "<topic>" })

    consumer.run({
        eachMessage: async ({ topic, partition, message }) => {
            console.log(message.value)
        }
    })
})()

Consumer example

import KafkaAvro from "kafkajs-avro"

(async () => {
    const kafka = new KafkaAvro({
        clientId: "<client-id>",
        brokers: ["<hostname>:9092"],
        avro: {
            url: "https://<hostname>:<port>" /* [Extra setting] */
        }
    })

    /* Consumer
       The consumer does not require any extra settings to be built.
       You may just remove .avro from the next line and you will see raw messages from
       the brokers - without avro decoding.
    */
    const consumer = kafka.avro.consumer({ groupId: "<consumer-group-id>" })
    await consumer.connect()
    await consumer.subscribe({ topic: "<topic>" })

    consumer.run({
        eachMessage: async ({ topic, partition, message }) => {
            /* message.value contains the decoded avro message */
            console.log(message.value)
        }
    })
})()

Producer example

import KafkaAvro from "kafkajs-avro"

(async () => {
    const kafka = new KafkaAvro({
        clientId: "<client-id>",
        brokers: ["<hostname>:9092"],
        avro: {
            url: "https://<hostname>:<port>" /* [Extra setting] */
        }
    })

    const producer = kafka.avro.producer()
    await producer.connect()

    producer.send({
        topic: "<topic>" /* The topic name */,
        messages: [
            {
                subject: "<subject>" /* [Extra setting] Avro subject to send */,
                version:
                    "latest" /* [Extra setting] Version of the avro subject to send */,
                value: { value: 1 } /* Your message value object to send */
            }
        ]
    })
})()

Underlying features from Kafka.js

All features from Kafka.js are preserved and adapted. Take a look at the Kafka.js project to see what's available. All extra settings and variables required by this library are highlighted with [Extra setting] on the examples.

Avro schema cache

Requests to the avro registry are minimised by locally caching schemas.

Available modules

import KafkaAvro, { KafkaAvro, Avro, Kafka } from "kafkajs-avro"

Kafka is kafkajs.

The module KafkaAvro is an extension of Kafka that requires a few more keys to construct and offers all Kafka functions under KafkaAvro.avro in a modified version that seemlessly handles avro encoding and decoding.

Types

This library uses typescript. This means that you'll see what functions are available to you and what keys are required to invoke a function or construct an instance class.