Kafka installation on Linux

Open the Apache Kafka download page, http://kafka.apache.org/downloads, as in Figure 1.1:

At the time of writing, the current Apache Kafka version is 2.0.0 as a stable release. Remember that, since version 0.8.x, Kafka is not backward-compatible. So, we cannot replace this version for one prior to 0.8. Once you've downloaded the latest available release, let's proceed with the installation.

Follow these steps to install Kafka in Linux:

1. Extract the downloaded file, kafka_2.11-2.0.0.tgz, in the /opt/ directory as follows:

      > tar xzf kafka_2.11-2.0.0.tgz

1. Create the KAFKA_HOME environment variable as follows:

      > export KAFKA_HOME=/opt/kafka_2.11-2.0.0

1. Add the Kafka bin directory to the PATH variable as follows:

      > export PATH=$PATH:$KAFKA_HOME/bin

Now Java, Scala, and Kafka are installed.

To do all of the previous steps from the command line, there is a powerful tool for macOS users called brew (the equivalent in Linux would be yum).