kitz

your Kafka desk clerk

A terminal UI for Kafka - topics, messages and consumer lag at a glance, across all your environments. Built for AWS MSK: kitz signs in with your ~/.aws credentials (IAM, SASL OAUTHBEARER) - no cert or JAAS juggling - and works just as well with any Kafka over plaintext or TLS.

Features

• IAM-native auth - connects to MSK with your AWS credentials; plaintext and plain-TLS clusters supported too (auth = "iam" | "tls" | "plaintext").
• Environment hot-switch - 1–9 to jump between stag / preprod / prod / regression without restarting. Prod is tagged red with a delete guardrail.
• Topics - pick a topic and everything loads by itself: message count, partitions, replication, live msg/s, retention and limits in plain units, which consumer groups read it and how far behind they are, per-partition offsets. Under-replicated partitions are flagged.
• Consumer lag - every group (idle ones too) with its total lag; the group view breaks it down per partition and warns when nothing is consuming.
• Messages - ↵ on a topic shows the latest messages, newest first, with pretty-printed JSON (key order kept); copy payload or key.
• Admin - create topic, add partitions, delete topic/group, with typed confirmation on prod for anything irreversible.
• kitz doctor <env> - layer-by-layer connectivity diagnosis.

Install

Prebuilt binary (recommended) - no dependencies, nothing to compile:

# npm
npm install -g @harry-kp/kitz

# Homebrew
brew install Harry-kp/tap/kitz

# curl
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Harry-kp/kitz/releases/latest/download/kitz-installer.sh | sh

# cargo, prebuilt
cargo binstall kitz

Prebuilt for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux x86_64. The Linux binary is fully static, so it runs on any distro - including the Amazon Linux bastion next to your MSK cluster. librdkafka and OpenSSL are baked in; there's nothing else to install. (Windows and Linux ARM aren't built yet.)

From source (cargo install) compiles librdkafka, so it needs cmake + Xcode Command Line Tools:

brew install cmake
cargo install kitz

Quick start

kitz init          # writes a commented starter config to ~/.config/kitz/config.toml
$EDITOR ~/.config/kitz/config.toml   # your brokers, regions, auth
kitz               # pick an environment - or `kitz stag` to open one directly

A single-environment config opens straight away. Config is read from ./kitz.toml, then ~/.config/kitz/config.toml, or --config <path>:

[[env]]
name = "stag"
bootstrap = "b-1.mycluster.xxxxx.kafka.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com:9092"
region = "eu-central-1"
auth = "plaintext"   # 9092=plaintext · 9094=tls · 9098=iam
prod = false

Can't connect? MSK brokers live on private VPC addresses, so kitz has to run somewhere that can reach them (on a VPN that routes the VPC, or a bastion inside it). kitz doctor <env> tells you whether it's the network, your credentials or the port, and the troubleshooting guide says what to do about each.

Keys

Key	Action
⇥	switch Topics ⟷ Consumer groups
↑↓ / j k	move · g / End top / bottom · PgUp PgDn scroll detail
/	filter the list · esc clears
↵	Topics: latest messages (r reload, y/Y copy) · Groups: open its topic
c / a / d	create / add partitions / delete
y	copy the selected name
r	refresh from the cluster
1–9 / e	switch environment / picker
x · L · ?	all actions · activity log · help
q / ctrl-c	quit

Building from source

kitz links librdkafka (built from source via cmake):

brew install cmake        # macOS
cargo build --release

More

• Troubleshooting - connection problems and what kitz doctor output means
• Security - what kitz does with your credentials and cluster
• Contributing - build, test, and what to discuss before a PR

License

MIT © Harry KP

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Apache Kafka® is a registered trademark of the Apache Software Foundation. Amazon MSK and AWS are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. kitz is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.