In this blog article I’ll show you how you can use the confluent CLI to set up a Kafka cluster on Confluent Cloud, the necessary API keys, and then a managed connector. The connector I’m setting up is the HTTP Source (v2) connector. It’s part of a pipeline that I’m working on to pull in a feed of data from the UK Environment Agency for processing. The data is spread across three endpoints, and one of the nice features of the HTTP Source (v2) connector is that one connector can pull data from more than one endpoint.

I do lots of work with Kafka Connect, almost entirely in Distributed mode—even just with 1 node -> makes scaling out much easier when/if needed. Because I’m using Distributed mode, I use the Kafka Connect REST API to configure and manage it. Whilst others might use GUI REST tools like Postman etc, I tend to just use the commandline. Here are some useful snippets that I use all the time.