Kafka Manager

What is Kafka Manager?

Kafka Manager is a web-based tool for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka clusters: view brokers, topics, partitions, and consumer group offsets from a browser instead of the Kafka CLI tools.

Start Kafka Manager

docker compose up -d zookeeper kafka kafka-manager

Kafka Manager talks to ZooKeeper to discover the cluster, so both zookeeper and kafka need to be running for it to be useful.

Stop Kafka Manager

docker compose stop kafka-manager

Configuration

kafka-manager/defaults.env doesn't exist, the container has no configurable .env variables. Its settings are fixed directly in kafka-manager/compose.yml:

Setting	Value	What it does
Host port	9020	Fixed mapping to the container's port 9000 (not overridable via .env).
ZK_HOSTS	zookeeper:2181	ZooKeeper connection string the manager uses to discover the cluster.

Add your cluster

1. Open http://localhost:9020.
2. Add a cluster pointing at the ZooKeeper host zookeeper:2181.

Common issues

• Port 9020 already in use on your host. Since it's hardcoded in compose.yml (not an .env variable), you'll need to edit kafka-manager/compose.yml directly to change it, or stop whatever else is bound to that port.
• "No clusters" or connection errors when adding a cluster. Confirm zookeeper is actually running (docker compose ps zookeeper) before adding the cluster, and that you used zookeeper:2181, not kafka:9092, as the connection string.
• Topics/brokers don't show up. Confirm kafka itself is up and has successfully registered with ZooKeeper; check docker compose logs kafka for startup errors.

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Need the Kafka broker itself? See Apache Kafka. New to Laradock? Start at Getting Started.