This provides a quick introduction to setting up a local Kafka instance and using Kafka Tool to view the messages. The initial part of the Kafka tutorial is adapted slightly from http://kafka.apache.org/quickstart.html . The following are steps for: Downloading and unpacking Apache Kafka in Linux Starting the Zookeeper and Kafka servers Creating a new topic Adding and viewing messages using the command line tools Use Kafka Tool to view the messages in a topic Step 1: Download Kafka cd ./Downloads/ wget http://mirror.catn.com/pub/apache/kafka/0.10.0.0/kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0.tgz tar -zxf kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0.tgz cd kafka_2.11-0.10.0.0 Step 2: Start the Zookeeper and Kafka servers Check the Kafka port in zookeeper.properties by looking at clientPort (typically 2181) in config/zookeeper.properties Start Zookeeper with: bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties and then start Kafka: bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties Step 3: