Use Kafka with C#

There are many Kafka clients for C#, a list of some recommended options can be found here. In this example we’ll be using Confluent’s kafka-dotnet client.

Dependencies

Add the Confluent.Kafka package to your application. This package is available via NuGet. You can install Confluent.Kafka from within Visual Studio by searching for Confluent.Kafka in the NuGet UI, or by running this command in the Package Manager Console:

Install-Package Confluent.Kafka -Version 0.11.4

Using client ⇆ broker encryption (SSL)

If you have chosen to enable client ⇆ broker encryption on your Kafka cluster, see here for information on the certificates required to establish an SSL connection to your Kafka cluster.

Producing Messages

Messages are produced to Kafka using a Producer object. In this example we provide only the required properties for the producer. See here for the full list of configuration options.

First create the configuration Dictionary:

Ensure the IP addresses, cluster certificate location and password are correct. If your Kafka cluster does not have client ⇆ broker encryption enabled your configuration options should look like this:

Make sure the IP addresses and password are correct.

Note: To connect to your Kafka cluster over the private network, use port 9093 instead of 9092.

Now that we have setup the configuration Dictionary, we can create a Producer object:

Once we have a Producer object we can use it to send a message to Kafka:

Note: we move the producer declaration into a using block here so it will be automatically closed cleanly once we’re finished with it.

Consuming Messages

Messages from Kafka are consumed using a Consumer object. In this example we provide only the required properties for the consumer. See here for the full list of configuration options.

First create the configuration Dictionary:

Ensure the IP addresses, cluster certificate location and password are correct. If your Kafka cluster does not have client ⇆ broker encryption enabled your configuration options should look like this:

Make sure the IP addresses and password are correct.

Note: To connect to your Kafka cluster over the private network, use port 9093 instead of 9092.

Now that we have the configuration Dictionary we can create a Consumer object:

Before we can consume messages, we need to subscribe to the topics we wish to receive messages from:

Now we are ready to consume messages from Kafka. To consume a single batch of messages, we use the consumer’s poll method:

Combined with a loop, we can continually consume and output messages from Kafka as they are produced:

Note: we move the consumer declaration into a using block here so it will be automatically closed cleanly once we’re finished with it.

Putting Them Together

Now that we have a consumer and producer setup, it’s time to combine them.

Start the consumer

Start the consumer before starting the producer because by default consumers only consume messages that were produced after the consumer started.

Start the producer

Now that the consumer is setup and ready to consume messages, you can now start your producer.

If the consumer and producer are setup correctly the consumer should output the message sent by the producer shortly after it was produced.