kplay lets you inspect messages in a Kafka topic in a simple and deliberate manner. Using it, you can pull one or more records on demand, peruse through them in a list, and, if needed, persist them to your local filesystem.

homebrew:

brew install dhth/tap/kplay

go:

go install github.com/dhth/kplay@latest

As a binary, kplay only supports consuming JSON messages.

kplay \
    -brokers='<COMMA_SEPARATED_BROKER_URLS>' \
    -topic='<TOPIC>' \
    -group='<CONSUMER-GROUP>'

Protobuf messages can be consumed, but that will need some tweaks to the source code.

Place your protobuf files under ./proto. Using the protoc compiler, run:

protoc --go_out=. proto/<YOUR_PROTOBUF_FILE>.proto

Change the generated struct reference in ./ui/model/utils.go.

Compile, and run.

By default, kplay operates under the assumption that brokers do not authenticate requests. Besides this, it also supports AWS IAM authentication (turned on via -auth='msk_iam_auth').

• Add ability to only save records that match a chosen set of keys

kplay is built using the awesome TUI framework bubbletea.