Kafka installation

There are three ways to install a Kafka environment:

• Downloading the executable files
• Using brew (in macOS) or yum (in Linux)
• Installing Confluent Platform

For all three ways, the first step is to install Java; we need Java 8. Download and install the latest JDK 8 from the Oracle's website: 

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

At the time of writing, the latest Java 8 JDK version is 8u191.

For Linux users :

1. Change the file mode to executable as follows, follows these steps:

      > chmod +x jdk-8u191-linux-x64.rpm

1. Go to the directory in which you want to install Java:

      > cd <directory path>

1. Run the rpm installer with the following command:

      > rpm -ivh jdk-8u191-linux-x64.rpm

1. Add to your environment the JAVA_HOME variable. The following command writes the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the /etc/profile file:

      > echo "export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.8.0_191" >> /etc/profile

1. Validate the Java installation as follows:

      > java -version
      java version "1.8.0_191"
      Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_191-b12)
      Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.191-b12, mixed mode)

At the time of writing, the latest Scala version is 2.12.6. To install Scala in Linux, perform the following steps:

1. Download the latest Scala binary from http://www.scala-lang.org/download
2. Extract the downloaded file, scala-2.12.6.tgz, as follows:

      > tar xzf scala-2.12.6.tgz

1. Add the  SCALA_HOME variable to your environment as follows:

      > export SCALA_HOME=/opt/scala

1. Add the Scala bin directory to your PATH environment variable as follows:

      > export PATH=$PATH:$SCALA_HOME/bin

1. To validate the Scala installation, do the following:

      >  scala -version
      Scala code runner version 2.12.6 -- Copyright 2002-2018,
      LAMP/EPFL and Lightbend, Inc.

To install Kafka on your machine, ensure that you have at least 4 GB of RAM, and the installation directory will be /usr/local/kafka/ for macOS users and /opt/kafka/ for Linux users. Create these directories according to your operating system.