This covers the two operations that make Kafka approachable from a chat: look at what is on a topic, and put something on one. That is genuinely useful for debugging a pipeline without a terminal. It is also a write path into a live cluster, so point it at a development environment first and confirm which topic a publish lands on. Connection settings, including SASL credentials, live in the launch arguments rather than the environment.
An MCP server for Apache Kafka. It connects to the brokers you name on the command line and lets a client read messages from a topic and publish messages to one, which puts basic topic work inside the conversation instead of a console consumer.
- Reading messages from a topic hosted on the connected Kafka instance
- Publishing a message to a topic
- Broker configuration at launch through `--kafka-bootstrap-servers`, which takes a comma-separated list
- Secured clusters supported through the same mechanism — `--kafka-security-protocol`, `--kafka-sasl-mechanism`, `--kafka-sasl-plain-username` and `--kafka-sasl-plain-password`
A reachable Kafka instance and `uv`. Clone the repository, then have the client run `uv --directory <repo> run mcp-server-kafka` with the connection arguments appended; the package is `mcp-server-kafka`, version 0.1.0. Credentials for a SASL cluster are passed as launch arguments, so keep the client config file protected.