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Why is kcat showing the wrong topics?

Published Mar 13, 2025 by in Kcat (Kafkacat), Apache Kafka at https://rmoff.net/2025/03/13/why-is-kcat-showing-the-wrong-topics/

Much as I love kcat (🤫 it’ll always be kafkacat to me…), this morning I nearly fell out with it 👇

😖 I thought I was going stir crazy, after listing topics on a broker and seeing topics from a different broker.

😵 WTF 😵

It turns out that the ~/.config.kcat.conf I created last week and was so proud to thinking to do takes 🚨PRIORITY🚨 over any CLI arguments provided.

So I was merrily telling it with CLI flag -b to use broker X:

kcat -b my-local-broker:9092 -L

and it was merrily listing topics from broker Y that’s specified in the config file:

$ cat ~/.config/kcat.conf
metadata.broker.list=lol-i-will-use-this-broker-instead-ha-ha-ha:9092

I still like the config file idea (Kris Jenkins wrote a nice blog article about it here), I just need to remember about it next time 🤦

Robin Moffatt

Robin Moffatt works on the DevRel team at Confluent. He likes writing about himself in the third person, eating good breakfasts, and drinking good beer.

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