Kafee

Let's get energized with Kafka!

Kafee is an abstraction layer above multiple different lower level Kafka libraries, while also adding features relevant to Stord. This allows switching between :brod or Broadway for message consuming with a quick configuration change and no code changes. Features include:

• Behaviour based adapters allowing quick low level changes.
• Built in support for testing without mocking.
• Automatic encoding and decoding of message values with Jason or Protobuf.
• :telemetry metrics for producing and consuming messages.
• Open Telemetry traces with correct attributes.
• DataDog data streams support via data-streams-ex.

Installation

Just add kafee to your mix.exs file like so:

def deps do
  [
    {:kafee, "~> 3.5.1", organization: "stord"}
  ]
end

Published Documentation

Documentation is automatically generated and published to HexDocs on new releases.

Quick Start

Here are two very basic examples of using a consumer and producer module with Kafee. Not all available options are documented, so please look at the individual modules for more details.

Consumers

You'll first setup a module for your consumer logic like so:

defmodule MyConsumer do
  use Kafee.Consumer,
    adapter: Application.compile_env(:my_app, :kafee_consumer_adapter, nil),
    consumer_group_id: "my-app",
    topic: "my-topic"

  def handle_message(%Kafee.Consumer.Message{} = message) do
    # Do some message handling
    :ok
  end
end

Then just start the module in your application with the correct connection details:

defmodule MyApplication do
  use Application

  def start(_type, _args) do
    children = [
      {MyConsumer, [
        host: "localhost",
        port: 9092,
        sasl: {:plain, "username", "password"},
        ssl: true
      ]}
    ]

    Supervisor.start_link(children, strategy: :one_for_one)
  end
end

And lastly, you'll want to set the consumer adapter in production. You can do this by adding this line to your config/prod.exs file:

import Config

config :my_app, kafee_consumer_adapter: Kafee.Consumer.BroadwayAdapter

This will ensure that your consumer does not start in development or testing environments, but only runs in production.

For more details on the consumer module, view the Kafee Consumer module documentation.

Producers

So you want to send messages to Kafka eh? Well, first you will need to create a producer module like so:

defmodule MyProducer do
  use Kafee.Producer,
    adapter: Application.compile_env(:my_app, :kafee_producer_adapter, nil),
    encoder: Kafee.JasonEncoderDecoder,
    topic: "my-topic",
    partition_fun: :hash

  # This is just a regular function that takes a struct from your
  # application and converts it to a `t:Kafee.Producer.Message/0`
  # struct and calls `produce/1`. Note that because we have the
  # `encoder` option set above, the `order` value will be JSON
  # encoded before sending to Kafka.
  def publish(:order_created, %Order{} = order) do
    produce(%Kafee.Producer.Message{
      key: order.tenant_id,
      value: order
    })
  end
end

Once your module is setup, you'll need to add it to the supervisor tree with connection details.

defmodule MyApplication do
  use Application

  def start(_type, _args) do
    children = [
      {MyProducer, [
        host: "localhost",
        port: 9092,
        sasl: {:plain, "username", "password"},
        ssl: true
      ]}
    ]

    Supervisor.start_link(children, strategy: :one_for_one)
  end
end

And finally, you'll want to use another adapter in production. So set that up in your config/prod.exs file:

import Config

config :my_app, kafee_producer_adapter: Kafee.Producer.AsyncAdapter

Once that is done, to publish a message simply run:

MyProducer.publish(:order_created, %Order{})

All messages published not in production will be a no-op. This means you do not need any Kafka instance setup to run in development. For testing, we recommend using the Kafee.Producer.TestAdapter adapter, allowing easier testing via the Kafee.Test module.