Kafka Please

This npm module lets you start up a Kafka broker (including ZooKeeper) locally. It's meant to facilitate integration tests when you need to test against a Kafka broker.

You need Java in order to run Kafka. This npm module assumes that you already have Java installed.

Usage:

npm install kafka-please --save-dev

const makeKafkaServer = require('kafka-please');

makeKafkaServer().then(kafkaServer => {
  // Do stuff that needs a Kafka broker here
  console.log('made kafka server', kafkaServer);
  console.log('zookeeper listens on', kafkaServer.zookeeperPort);
  console.log('kafka listens on', kafkaServer.kafkaPort);

  // Remember to shut down the server afterwards!
  return kafkaServer.close().then(() => {
    console.log('stopped kafka server');
    return Promise.resolve();
  });
});

Timeouts in mocha

Typically, starting a Kafka server takes ~2-3 seconds, and can make your mocha tests time out, if you don't override the timeout:

describe('my integration test', () => {
  it('should use kafka', function() {
    this.timeout(60000); // Set timeout to 60 seconds, just to be sure
    // start kafka, run integration tests etc. here
  });
});

Developing

• git clone this project
• run fetch.sh to download Kafka and unzip it
• run npm install to get dependencies
• npm test will run the integration tests.