How The Kafka Project Handles Clients

Starting with the 0.8 release we are maintaining all but the jvm client external to the main code base. The reason for this is that it allows a small group of implementers who know the language of that client to quickly iterate on their code base on their own release cycle. Having these maintained centrally was becoming a bottleneck as the main committers can't hope to know every possible programming language to be able to perform meaningful code review and testing. This lead to a scenario where the committers were attempting to review and test code they didn't understand.

We are instead moving to the redis/memcached model which seems to work better at supporting a rich ecosystem of high quality clients.

We haven't tried all these clients and can't vouch for them. The normal rules of open source apply.

If you are aware of other clients not listed here (or are the author of such a client), please add it here. Please also feel free to help fill out information on the features the client supports, level of activity of the project, level of documentation, etc.

For 0.8.x

The 0.8 release changes the protocol fairly substantially. The new protocol is documented here.

Producer Daemon

Bruce is a producer daemon that supports clients in various programming languages.  Clients write messages to Bruce's UNIX domain datagram socket in a simple binary format.  Bruce then takes full responsibility for reliable message delivery.  Monitoring infrastructure can query Bruce's web interface for JSON-based status and data quality reports.

Maintainer: Dave Peterson
License: Apache v.2.0

https://github.com/ifwe/bruce

Python

Pure Python implementation with full protocol support. Consumer and Producer implementations included, GZIP and Snappy compression supported.

Maintainer: Dana Powers
License: Apache v.2.0

http://github.com/dpkp/kafka-python

Python driver with full protocol support and balanced consumer implementation. GZIP and Snappy compression supported.

Maintainer: Parse.ly
License: Apache v2.0

https://github.com/Parsely/pykafka

Go (AKA golang)

Pure Go implementation with full protocol support. Consumer and Producer implementations included, GZIP and Snappy compression supported.

Maintainer: Shopify
License:
MIT

https://github.com/Shopify/sarama

 

Enhanced Go Kafka consumer and producer implementations.

Maintainer: Big Data Open Source Security
License:
Apache v2.0
https://github.com/stealthly/go_kafka_client

 

A pure Go implementation of the low level Kafka API.

Maintainer: Big Data Open Source Security
License:
 Apache v2.0

https://github.com/stealthly/siesta

 

A fast pure Go Kafka implementation with a clean API.

Maintainer: OptioPay
License:
 MIT

https://github.com/optiopay/kafka

 

C/C++

Robust high performance C/C++ library with full protocol support

Maintainer: Magnus Edenhill
License: 2-clause BSD

https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka

Native C++ library with protocol support for Metadata, Produce, Fetch, and Offset.

Maintainer: David Tompkins
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/adobe-research/libkafka

C++ Header-only Kafka Client Library using Boost Asio

Maintainer: Daniel Joos
License: MIT

https://github.com/danieljoos/libkafka-asio

A C++11 asyncronous producer/consumer library for Apache Kafka based on boost asio

Maintainer: Svante Karlsson
License: Boost Software License - Version 1.0

https://github.com/bitbouncer/csi-kafka

.net

Pure C# client with full protocol support.  Includes consumer, producer,

lower level components and gzip support (no snappy)

Maintainer: James Roland 

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/Jroland/kafka-net

 

This is a .NET implementation of a client for Kafka using C# for Kafka 0.8. It provides for an implementation that covers most basic functionalities to include a simple Producer and Consumer.

Maintainer: ExactTarget

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/ExactTargetDev/kafka-net

 

rdkafka-dotnet is a C# client for Apache Kafka based on librdkafka.

Maintainer: Andreas Heider

License: BSD (2 clause)

https://github.com/ah-/rdkafka-dotnet


.Net implementation of the Apache Kafka Protocol that provides basic functionality through Producer/Consumer classes. The project also offers balanced consumer implementation. The project is a fork from ExactTarget's Kafka-net Client.

Maintainer: Microsoft

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/Microsoft/Kafkanet

 

Clojure

Fast kafka api for JVM languages implemented in clojure

Maintainerhttps://github.com/gerritjvv

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/gerritjvv/kafka-fast


Wrapper to the Java API for interacting with Kafka

Maintainerhttps://github.com/pingles

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/pingles/clj-kafka/ 

 

Kafka clojure client library

MaintainerPierre-Yves Ritschard

License: MIT

Code, Documentation

 

Ruby

Pure Ruby, Consumer and Producer implementations included, GZIP and Snappy compression supported. Ruby 1.9.3 and up (CI runs MRI 2.0, JRuby and Rubinius).

Maintainer: Bob Potter
License: MIT

https://github.com/bpot/poseidon

 

Karafka - Microframework used to simplify Apache Kafka-based Ruby applications development.

Maintainer: Maciej Mensfeld
Licence
: MIT

https://github.com/karafka/karafka

 

ruby-kaka - A Ruby client library for the Kafka distributed log system

MaintainerZendeskDaniel Schierbeck

Licence: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/zendesk/ruby-kafka

Node.js

Kafka-Node is a NodeJS client with Zookeeper integration

Maintainersohu.com

License: MIT

https://github.com/SOHU-Co/kafka-node/

Kafka-node is a pure JavaScript implementation for NodeJS Server with Vagrant and Docker support.

Maintainerwurstmeister
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/wurstmeister/node-kafka-0.8-plus

Node-kafka is a node.js wrapper for the C library librdkafka

Maintainer: Sutoiku

License: MIT

https://github.com/sutoiku/node-kafka

 

kafka-java-bridge is a Nodejs wrapper for the JAVA high level kafka 0.8. consumer API

Maintainer: LivePersonInc

License: MIT

https://www.npmjs.com/package/kafka-java-bridge

https://github.com/LivePersonInc/kafka-java-bridge

Alternative Java Clients

Of course the main project maintains a set of jvm-based clients. But here are alternate clients.

Krackle is an optimized Kafka client built by Blackberry.

Maintainer: Blackberry

License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/blackberry/Krackle/blob/dev/LICENSE

Storm 

Port of Apache storm-kafka to >= 0.8.0

Maintainerwurstmeister
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/wurstmeister/storm-kafka-0.8-plus

Scala DSL 

A DSL for Scala developers to produce and consume messages with Kafka.  

MaintainerBig Data Open Source Security LLC
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/stealthly/scala-kafka

HTTP REST 

Apache Kafka HTTP Endpoint for producing and consuming messages from topics

MaintainerBig Data Open Source Security LLC
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/stealthly/dropwizard-kafka-http

 

(Deprecated) Kafka high level Producer and Consumer APIs are very hard to implement right. Rest endpoint gives access to native Scala high level consumer and producer APIs.

Maintainer: Sasha Klizhentas
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/mailgun/kafka-http

 

The Kafka REST Proxy provides a RESTful interface to a Kafka cluster.

Maintainer: Confluent 
License: Apache 2.0

 

Kafka-Pixy is a local aggregating HTTP proxy to Kafka messaging cluster.

Maintainer: Mailgun
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/mailgun/kafka-pixy

 

Efficient Kafka REST Proxy for producers

https://github.com/klarna/kastle

Maintainers: Ivan Dyachkov (Klarna AB)Shi Zaiming (Klarna AB)
License: Apache 2.0

JRuby 

JRuby wrapper for producers and consumers of the existing API

Maintainer: Joseph Lawson
License: Apache 2.0

https://github.com/joekiller/jruby-kafka

Perl

Pure Perl, Consumer and Producer implementations included. Zookeeper
integration. GZIP and Snappy compression supported.

Maintainer: Sergey Gladkov
License: Artistic License

https://github.com/TrackingSoft/Kafka
http://search.cpan.org/~sgladkov/Kafka/lib/Kafka.pm

stdin/stdout

Generic producer and consumer for stdin and stdout

https://github.com/edenhill/kafkacat

Maintainer: Magnus Edenhill
License: 2-clause BSD

Erlang

A minimal, high-performance Kafka client in Erlang

https://github.com/helpshift/ekaf

Maintainer: Helpshift
License: Apache v2

Kafka client library in Erlang. Full support for 0.9+ consumer protocol, very efficient producer implementation.

https://github.com/klarna/brod

Maintainers: Ivan Dyachkov (Klarna AB)Shi Zaiming (Klarna AB)
License: Apache 2.0

PHP

PHP extension built on librdkafka

Maintainer:  Elias Van Ootegem
License: MIT

https://github.com/EVODelavega/phpkafka

 

PHP client based on librdkafka

Maintainer: Arnaud Le Blanc, for Mention.com
License: MIT

https://github.com/arnaud-lb/php-rdkafka

 

Rust

Pure Rust implementation with support for Metadata, Produce, Fetch, and Offset requests. Supports Gzip and Snappy compression

Maintainer:  Yousuf Fauzan
License: MIT

Code
Documentation

0.1-0.7.x

Java

Maintained with the main code base.

C

Native C library with Consumer, Producer and compression support.

https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka

Maintainer: Magnus Edenhill
License: 2-clause BSD

C++

https://github.com/quipo/kafka-cpp

PHP

PHP library with Consumer (simple and Zookeeper-based), Producer and compression support (release notes).

https://github.com/quipo/kafka-php

Maintainer: Lorenzo Alberton
License: Apache v.2.0

Also:

https://github.com/michal-harish/kafka-php

Log4PHP Appender

https://github.com/dastra/log4php-kafka

Python

We have a wealth of python clients!

Protocol support for Kafka 0.7 in Python. GZip and Snappy compression supported

Maintainer: David Arthur
License: Apache v.2.0

https://github.com/mumrah/kafka-python/tree/0.7

Also:
https://github.com/dsully/pykafka
Maintainer:: Dan Sulley, LinkedIn
License: Apache 2.0

Python client from Disqus:
https://github.com/getsamsa/samsa
Maintainer:: Keith Bourgoin, Parse.ly
License: Apache 2.0

Python client from Urban Airship: https://github.com/urbanairship/pykafkap

Python client from Datadog: https://github.com/datadog/brod
(Producer, Simple Consumer, ZK-Consumer)

Ruby

https://github.com/acrosa/kafka-rb
Maintainer: Alejandro Crosa
License:: Apache 2.0

Event machine client:
https://github.com/groupme/em-kafka

JRuby Event stream processor
https://github.com/wooga/kafkaesque

Clojure

https://github.com/pingles/clj-kafka

https://github.com/miniway/kafka-clj

Go

https://github.com/nuance/kafka

https://github.com/jdamick/kafka.go

Node.js

Low-level protocol support in node.js.

https://github.com/cainus/Prozess
https://npmjs.org/package/prozess
Maintainers:
Gregg Caines
Eric lee
License: MIT

Alternate node client from Tagged
https://github.com/marcuswestin/node-kafka

Also:
https://github.com/dannycoates/franz-kafka

Erlang

erlkafka is a kafka client written in erlang

https://github.com/milindparikh/erlkafka.git

Maintainer: Milind Parikh
*License: BSD, LGPL

Also:
https://github.com/wooga/kafka-erlang

Client Libraries Previously Supported

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/kafka/branches/legacy_client_libraries