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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​

./laradock start 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​

./laradock stop kafka-manager

To delete the container entirely:

./laradock remove 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:

SettingValueWhat it does
Host port9020Fixed mapping to the container's port 9000 (not overridable via .env).
ZK_HOSTSzookeeper:2181ZooKeeper 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.

There's no login screen, no built-in authentication, anyone who can reach port 9020 can add/remove clusters and browse topic data. Fine for local development, but don't expose this port beyond your own machine.

Where cluster config is stored​

Kafka Manager itself is stateless, it has no data volume of its own (check kafka-manager/compose.yml, there's no volumes: entry). Every cluster you add through the UI is actually persisted inside ZooKeeper, under its own znode, not inside the Kafka Manager container. That means:

  • Removing/recreating the kafka-manager container is safe, your added clusters survive.
  • Wiping ZooKeeper's data (${DATA_PATH_HOST}/zookeeper) removes the cluster list too, you'll need to re-add it via the UI afterward.

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 (./laradock logs 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 ./laradock logs kafka for startup errors.
  • Cluster disappeared after a rebuild. You likely wiped ZooKeeper's data folder rather than Kafka Manager's, see Where cluster config is stored above; re-add the cluster once ZooKeeper is back up.

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