Command Line Interface Tools for Confluent Platform

This page provides an overview of the command-line interface (CLI) tools available for interacting with and managing your Confluent Platform environment. These tools enable you to perform various tasks, from administering Kafka clusters to diagnosing issues and working with data.

Confluent provided tools

The following CLI tools are officially provided or bundled with your Confluent Platform installation. They offer comprehensive functionalities for managing your Kafka cluster and its components, providing seamless integration and dedicated support.

  • Bundled CLI Tools - These are the core CLI tools included directly with your Confluent Platform installation, located in the CONFLUENT_HOME/bin directory. They provide fundamental features for managing your Kafka cluster and its components, including Kafka tools and Confluent specific utilities.
  • Confluent CLI - The Confluent CLI is a unified CLI designed for managing Confluent Platform deployments. It offers a comprehensive set of commands for interacting with Kafka topics, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Schema Registry, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and more.
  • Confluent Diagnostics Tool - The Confluent Platform Diagnostics Bundle Tool is a dedicated utility for collecting diagnostic information about your Confluent Platform installation. This tool gathers logs, configuration files, process information, and metrics from Kafka brokers and Kafka Connect, consolidating them into a .tar.gz file for analysis. This is particularly useful when engaging with Confluent Support.
  • kcat (formerly kafkacat) - kcat is a command-line utility for testing and debugging Apache Kafka® deployments. You can use kcat to produce and consume messages, and to inspect topic and partition details.

Additional community tools

The following CLI tools are popular within the Apache Kafka® and Confluent Platform community. While not developed or officially supported by Confluent, you can use them for specific configuration and management tasks.

Note

Confluent does not provide support for these third-party tools.

  • kafkactl - A command-line tool for interacting with Kafka clusters. It offers features for querying information (brokers, topics, messages, and consumer groups) and managing various resources.
  • kaf - A minimalistic CLI tool for Kafka management, designed for simplicity in common operations like producing and consuming messages, and managing clusters and topics.
  • topicctl - A command-line tool for declarative management of Kafka topics. It allows you to define topic configurations in YAML and apply them to your cluster. This is similar to how kubectl manages Kubernetes resources.
  • kcctl - A command-line client specifically for managing Kafka connector.
  • strimzi cli - A command-line tool that helps users manage Kafka on Kubernetes with the Strimzi Kafka Operator.