Installing Confluent Kafka on Ubuntu WSL running on Windows 10 OS

Apache Kafka Sep 6, 2021

This post documents the process of installing Confluent Kafka community edition on Ubuntu WSL running on Windows 10 OS.

Introduction

Confluent Kafka is mainly a data streaming platform consisting of most of the Kafka features and a few other things. Its main objective is not limited to provide a pub-sub platform only but also to provide data storage and processing capabilities.

Goals

Downlod Confluent Kafka
Copy Confluent Kafka from Windows OS to Linux
Unzip Confluent Kafka TAR file
Set CONFLUENT_HOME and PATH values
UPDATE Confluent Kafka server.properties file
Kafka Management (Start, Stop)
Cleanup (Remove)

Minimum Requirements

Windows 10 Operating System with WSL enabled/installed.

Note: To enable/install WSL on Windows 10, refer to the following posts.

Downlod Confluent Kafka TAR file

From a browser on your Windows 10 OS, navigate to https://www.confluent.io/get-started?product=software, provide the necessary details.

you will now be re-directed to https://www.confluent.io/installation page. Click on the TAR download button to save the software on your Windows 10 OS file system. The size of the file is approximately 1.4 GB.

Copy Confluent Kafka from Windows OS to Linux

From your Ubuntu WSL command prompt enter ll /mnt/ to view the Windows 10 OS hard disk partions.

Copy the confluent software from the download location in Windows 10 OS to the present working directory in WSL (Ubuntu).

cp /mnt/YOUR_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION_HERE/DOWNLOAD_FILE_NAME.tar .

To check if the file has been moved successfully, issue the ll command.

Unzip Confluent Kafka TAR file

Now that the file is present in the WSL, let's unzip the file name. tar -zxvf DOWNLOAD_FILE_NAME.tar

To check if the file has been unzipped successfully into a folder, issue the ll command again.

Set CONFLUENT_HOME and PATH values

Issue nano .profile command, or use any other editor to edit the .profile file.

Add CONFLUENT_HOME and also set PATH to include the kafka /bin folder.

To check if CONFLUENT_HOME has been successfully set or not, issue echo $CONFLUENT_HOME command.

UPDATE Confluent Kafka server.properties file

Edit listeners, advertised.listeners values and uncomment listener.security.protocol.map in Kafka server.properties file with the following values by issuing the following command nano /YOUR_UNZIPPED_CONFLUENT_KAFKA_FOLDER/etc/kafka/server.properties.

Example: nano /home/anantharajuc/confluent-6.2.0/etc/kafka/server.properties