Manage Apache Kafka clusters directly from VS Code: connect to one or more clusters, browse topics and partitions, inspect consumer groups and their lag, produce messages, and tail live traffic — all from a sidebar tree and a message-browser panel.
Features
Cluster explorer — a "Kafka" activity bar view lists your configured clusters. Connect/disconnect per cluster from inline icons.
Topics — expand a cluster to see its topics, and a topic to see its partitions (leader, replicas, in-sync replicas).
Consumer groups — expand "Consumer Groups" to see each group and its per-partition committed offset, high-water mark, and lag.
Message browser — click a topic to open a panel that can load the most recent messages per partition, tail new messages live, and produce a new message with an optional key.
Topic management — create and delete topics from the tree's context menu.
Requirements
Network access to your Kafka broker(s). No local Kafka installation is required by the extension itself — it talks to brokers over the wire via KafkaJS.
Getting started
Open the Kafka view in the activity bar.
Click Add Cluster (+) and enter a name and comma-separated broker list, e.g. localhost:9092.
Click the connect icon on the cluster to connect.
Expand Topics or Consumer Groups to browse, or click a topic to open its message browser.
Extension Settings
kafka.clusters: array of { id, name, brokers } entries. Normally managed via the Kafka: Add Cluster / Kafka: Remove Cluster commands, but can be hand-edited in settings.json.
Known Issues
Authenticated clusters (SASL/SSL) are not yet supported — only plaintext broker connections.
The message browser's "Load Recent" reads from the end of each partition using a throwaway consumer group, so it never affects real consumer group offsets, but very large messages or very high-throughput topics may take a moment to load.
Release Notes
0.0.1
Initial release: cluster explorer, topic/partition browsing, consumer group lag, message tailing and producing, topic create/delete.
