elytron

n.

1. The hardened shell of a beetle.¹
2. A handy interface for Kafka in Node.

Compatible with Kafka 0.8.x.x and higher.

Elytron relies on the kafkacat C library. See kafkacat for instructions on how to install it.

Usage

Elytron can be installed by running npm i -s elytron in the terminal.

Elytron's API exposes three things:

import { produce, consume, starve } from 'elytron';

You'll need to ensure the KAFKA_BROKERS environment variable is set to the comma-separated list of brokers you want to use, e.g.:

export KAFKA_BROKERS="broker1,broker2,broker3"
# For local testing, such as with a kafka docker cluster: 
KAFKA_BROKERS="localhost:9092,localhost:9093,localhost:9094" npm start

Producing Messages

A message can be produced and sent to Kafka on a topic by calling the produce function and passing it the name of a topic as a string. Example:

produce('an_interesting_topic');

Every message produced by elytron includes a timestamp and a unique identifier with the original message. If no message is provided, as in the example above, a "registration" message is created; its value is set to the timestamp of when it is called.

A message can be included like so:

produce('an_interesting_topic', a_relevant_message);

The message provided must be JSON-serializable.

produce returns a hash containing the status of the produced message. An example hash might look like:

let message = { presses: 'stop' };
let status = produce('news', message);
console.log(status);
//{
//  payload: {
//    timestamp: 1484272028549,
//    id: '1befd1ad-351e-47fe-bb1a-eb5019cbfbd9',
//    value: {
//      // If no message is provided, this would be:
//      // registration: 1484272028549
//      presses: 'stop'
//    }
//  }
//}

Callbacks & Responses

The produce method accepts an optional callback as a third argument:

function work (response) {
  // Work based on the response message happens here
}
 
produce('an_interesting_topic', a_relevant_message, some_work_to_do);
//{
//  payload: {
//    timestamp: 1484272028549,
//    id: '1befd1ad-351e-47fe-bb1a-eb5019cbfbd9',
//    value: {
//      bar: 'bar'
//    },
//    response_topic: "response.an_interesting_topic.1befd1ad-351e-47fe-bb1a-eb5019cbfbd9"
//  }
//}

If a callback is provided, elytron will create a "private" topic using a UUID, automatically create a consumer for it, and include the name of the response_topic in its initial message payload. This allows for a consumer listening on the initial topic to provide a response message, which is in turn passed to the callback as a response. Example:

  consume('an_interesting_topic', (msg) => {
    // Do some work with what you consume
    return 'a_reply_message'
  });
  
  produce('an_interesting_topic', a_relevant_message, (response) => {
    const { payload: { value } } = JSON.parse(response);
    console.log(value); // 'a_reply_message'
  });

Consuming Messages

There are multiple ways to consume topics with the consume function.

// Consume a single topic, do some work for each message
consume('news', (msg) => { /* Do work */ });
 
// Consume multiple topics, doing work for messages on any of them
consume(['media', 'entertainment'], (msg) => {
  // Returned values from a consumer's callback get produced on the
  // response_topic, if it's present
  return msg.split('').reverse().join('');
});
 
// Consume as a High-Level Consumer, part of a balanced Consumer Group
consume(topic, work, { group: 'engineering' });
 
// Consume a topic starting at offset 5 (e.g. consume from the 6th on), and
// continue through all subsequent messages
consume(topic, work, { group: false, offset: 5 });
 
// Same as above, but exit when the last message has been consumed
consume(topic, work, { group: false, offset: 5, exit: true });
 
// Consume on all available topics
consume('*', (msg) => {});

Elytron can stop consuming from topics via the starve function, like so:

// Stop all consumers of sugar
starve('sugar');
 
// Stop a particular consumer from television
starve('television', "1befd1ad-351e-47fe-bb1a-eb5019cbfbd9");

Tests

To run tests for elytron, within the repo execute either npm test to run the suite, or npm run watch to execute the suite and watch for changes.