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MacOS Quick Start Guide

Redpanda is a modern streaming platform for mission critical workloads. With Redpanda you can get up and running with streaming quickly and be fully compatible with the Kafka ecosystem.

This quick start guide can help you get started with Redpanda for development and testing purposes. For production or benchmarking, set up a production deployment.

Getting Redpanda running

To run Redpanda on MacOS, we’ll use rpk to bring up Redpanda nodes in Docker containers. Make sure that you install Docker first.

If you want to customize the containers, you can also set up your own Redpanda containers in Docker.

Installing rpk

You can install rpk on MacOS either with Homebrew or you can just download the binary.

  • To install rpk with Homebrew, run: brew install vectorizedio/tap/redpanda

  • To download the rpk binary:

    1. Download the rpk archive with: curl -LO https://github.com/vectorizedio/redpanda/releases/latest/download/rpk-darwin-amd64.zip
    2. Unpack the archive to /usr/local/bin or any location in your $PATH with: unzip rpk-darwin-amd64.zip

Running a redpanda cluster

To run Redpanda in a 3-node cluster, run: rpk container start -n 3

The first time you run rpk container start, it downloads an image matching the rpk version (you can check it by running rpk version). You now have a 3-node cluster running Redpanda!

The command output shows the addresses of the cluster nodes:

$ rpk container start -n 3
Downloading latest version of Redpanda
Starting cluster
Waiting for the cluster to be ready...
  NODE ID  ADDRESS          
  0        127.0.0.1:49462  
  1        127.0.0.1:49468  
  2        127.0.0.1:49467

You can run rpk commands to interact with the cluster, for example:

rpk cluster info --brokers 127.0.0.1:49462,127.0.0.1:49468,127.0.0.1:49467

Do some streaming

Here are the basic commands to produce and consume streams:

  1. Create a topic. We’ll call it “twitch_chat”:

    rpk topic create twitch_chat --brokers <broker1_address>,<broker2_address>...

  2. Produce messages to the topic:

    rpk topic produce twitch_chat --brokers <broker1_address>,<broker2_address>...

    Type text into the topic and press Ctrl + D to seperate between messages.

    Press Ctrl + C to exit the produce command.

  3. Consume (or read) the messages in the topic:

    rpk topic consume twitch_chat --brokers <broker1_address>,<broker2_address>...

    Each message is shown with its metadata, like this:

    {
    "message": "How do you stream with Redpanda?\n",
    "partition": 0,
    "offset": 1,
    "timestamp": "2021-02-10T15:52:35.251+02:00"
    }

You’ve just installed Redpanda and done streaming in a few easy steps.

Clean Up

When you are finished with the cluster, you can shutdown and delete the nodes with:

rpk container purge

What’s Next?