"Hello World" for Apache Kafka

This walkthrough starts a Korvet broker against your own Redis, creates a topic, and produces and consumes your first records with standard Kafka tooling.

If you just want to watch Korvet run with data already flowing, use the demo instead — it provisions everything for you. This page is the bring-your-own-client baseline.

Prerequisites

  • Install Korvet — on macOS and Linux, brew install redis/tap/korvet.

  • A module-enabled Redis 8+. The quickest option:

    docker run -d --name korvet-redis -p 6379:6379 redis:8

  • A Kafka client. The examples below use the kafka-console-* tools that ship with Apache Kafka.

Step 1 — Start the broker

korvet server

The broker starts on localhost:9092 and connects to Redis at redis://localhost:6379 by default. To run it in a container instead:

docker run -p 9092:9092 redisfield/korvet:latest server

Step 2 — Create a topic

Use the bundled CLI:

korvet topics --create --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic helloworld --partitions 3

Confirm it was created:

korvet topics --list --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

Step 3 — Produce records

Korvet speaks the Kafka protocol, so any Kafka producer works:

echo "hello world" | kafka-console-producer --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic helloworld

Step 4 — Consume records

kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic helloworld --from-beginning

You should see hello world printed back. Press Ctrl-C to stop the consumer.

What you accomplished

You started a Korvet broker backed by Redis, created a topic, and produced and consumed records through it — using nothing but the standard Kafka API. Any Kafka client, framework, or connector that targets localhost:9092 works the same way.

Next steps