Redpanda CLI Quickstart
This guide shows how to run the Redpanda CLI, rpk
, for basic Redpanda tasks, including creating, producing to, describing, and deleting topics, as well as consuming records and managing consumer groups. Follow these examples to quickly become familiar with rpk
commands.
Consider creating an rpk profile to simplify your development experience with multiple Redpanda clusters by saving and reusing configurations for different clusters. For more information, see About rpk profiles.
Pre-requisites
-
A running Redpanda cluster.
-
The
rpk
CLI installed. See Install or Update rpk.
Create a topic
To start streaming data, first create a topic as the destination for your records:
rpk topic create tutorial
Output:
TOPIC STATUS
tutorial OK
See rpk topic create.
Produce records to a topic
Produce records to the topic. Downstream consumers will then be able to read these records. To exit the producer session, press Ctrl+C
:
rpk topic produce tutorial
Additional input:
hello
world
Output:
Produced to partition 0 at offset 0 with timestamp 1734640650348.
Produced to partition 0 at offset 1 with timestamp 1734640653558.
See rpk topic produce.
Get a description of a topic
Check the topic’s configuration and status to ensure that it’s ready for use:
rpk topic describe tutorial
Output:
SUMMARY
=======
NAME tutorial
PARTITIONS 1
REPLICAS 1
CONFIGS
=======
KEY VALUE SOURCE
cleanup.policy delete DEFAULT_CONFIG
compression.type producer DEFAULT_CONFIG
delete.retention.ms -1 DEFAULT_CONFIG
flush.bytes 262144 DEFAULT_CONFIG
flush.ms 100 DEFAULT_CONFIG
initial.retention.local.target.bytes -1 DEFAULT_CONFIG
initial.retention.local.target.ms -1 DEFAULT_CONFIG
max.message.bytes 1048576 DEFAULT_CONFIG
message.timestamp.type CreateTime DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.iceberg.delete true DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.iceberg.mode disabled DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.leaders.preference none DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.remote.delete true DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.remote.read false DEFAULT_CONFIG
redpanda.remote.write false DEFAULT_CONFIG
retention.bytes -1 DEFAULT_CONFIG
retention.local.target.bytes -1 DEFAULT_CONFIG
retention.local.target.ms 86400000 DEFAULT_CONFIG
retention.ms 604800000 DEFAULT_CONFIG
segment.bytes 134217728 DEFAULT_CONFIG
segment.ms 1209600000 DEFAULT_CONFIG
write.caching true DEFAULT_CONFIG
See rpk topic describe.
Consume records from a topic
Consume records from the topic:
rpk topic consume tutorial
Output:
{ "topic": "tutorial", "value": "hello", "timestamp": 1678807229837, "partition": 0, "offset": 0 }
{ "topic": "tutorial", "value": "world", "timestamp": 1678807232413, "partition": 0, "offset": 1 }
Consume from an offset, where 2
is not inclusive:
rpk topic consume tutorial --offset 0:2
Output:
{ "topic": "tutorial", "value": "hello", "timestamp": 1678807229837, "partition": 0, "offset": 0 }
{ "topic": "tutorial", "value": "world", "timestamp": 1678807232413, "partition": 0, "offset": 1 }
See rpk topic consume.
Create a consumer group and consume topics
Organize consumers into groups to share workloads and balance consumption:
rpk topic consume tutorial --group tutorial-group
The consumer group is created when you start consuming from the topic. |
Output:
{
"topic": "tutorial",
"value": "hello",
"timestamp": 1734640650348,
"partition": 0,
"offset": 0
}
{
"topic": "tutorial",
"value": "world",
"timestamp": 1734640653558,
"partition": 0,
"offset": 1
}
See rpk topic consume.
List all consumer groups
List available consumer groups in your cluster:
rpk group list
Output:
BROKER GROUP STATE
0 tutorial-group Empty
See rpk group list.
Get a description of a consumer group
View details about the consumer group’s state, coordinator, members, and offsets:
rpk group describe tutorial-group
Output:
GROUP tutorial-group
COORDINATOR 0
STATE Empty
BALANCER
MEMBERS 0
TOTAL-LAG 0
TOPIC PARTITION CURRENT-OFFSET LOG-START-OFFSET LOG-END-OFFSET LAG MEMBER-ID CLIENT-ID HOST
tutorial 0 2 0 2 0
See rpk group describe.
Delete a consumer group
Clean up by removing the tutorial-group
consumer group:
rpk group delete tutorial-group
Output:
GROUP STATUS
tutorial-group OK
See rpk group delete.
Delete a topic
Clean up by removing the tutorial
topic:
rpk topic delete tutorial
Output:
TOPIC STATUS
tutorial OK
See rpk topic delete.
Next steps
-
To generate a profile to save and reuse configurations for different Redpanda clusters, see About rpk profiles.
-
For the complete list of
rpk
commands and their syntax, see the rpk Command Reference.