Kafka Connect can't find connector

Question

I\'m trying to use the Kafka Connect Elasticsearch connector, and am unsuccessful. It is crashing with the following error:

[2018-11-21 14:48:29,096] ERROR S         


        

Answer 1

The compiled JAR needs to be available to Kafka Connect. You have a few options here:

1. Use Confluent Platform, which includes the Elasticsearch (and others) pre-built: https://www.confluent.io/download/. There's zip, rpm/deb, Docker images etc available.

2. Build the JAR yourself. This typically involves:

   cd kafka-connect-elasticsearch-5.0.1
   mvn clean package
   

   Then take the resulting kafka-connect-elasticsearch-5.0.1.jar JAR and put it in a path as configured in Kafka Connect with plugin.path.

You can find more info on using Kafka Connect here:

• https://www.confluent.io/blog/simplest-useful-kafka-connect-data-pipeline-world-thereabouts-part-1/
• https://www.confluent.io/blog/blogthe-simplest-useful-kafka-connect-data-pipeline-in-the-world-or-thereabouts-part-2/
• https://www.confluent.io/blog/simplest-useful-kafka-connect-data-pipeline-world-thereabouts-part-3/

Disclaimer: I work for Confluent, and wrote the above blog posts.

Answer 2

The plugin path must load JAR files, containing compiled code, not raw Java classes of the source code (src/main/java).

It also needs to be the parent directory of other directories which are containing those plug-ins.

plugin.path=/opt/kafka-connect/plugins/

Where

$ ls - lR /opt/kafka-connect/plugins/
kafka-connect-elasticsearch-x.y.z/
    file1.jar
    file2.jar 
    etc

Ref - Manually installing Community Connectors

The Kafka Connect startup scripts in the Confluent Platform automatically (used to?) read all folders that match share/java/kafka-connect-*, too, so that's one way to go. At least, it will continue doing so, if you include the path to the share/java folder of the Confluent package installation in the plugin path as well

If you are not very familiar with Maven, or even if you are, then you actually cannot just clone the Elasticsearch connector repo and build the master branch; it has prerequisites of first Kafka, then the common Confluent repo first. Otherwise, you must checkout a Git tag like 5.0.1-post that matches a Confluent release.

An even simpler option would be to grab the package using Confluent Hub CLI

And if none of that works, just downloading the Confluent Platform and using the Kafka Connect scripts would be the most easiest. This does not imply you need to use the Kafka or Zookeeper configurations from that

Answer 3

I ran jdbc connector yesterday manually on kafka in docker without confluent platform etc just to learn how those things works underneath. I did not have to build jar on my side or anyhing like this. Hopefully it will be relevant for you - what I did is ( I will skip docker parts howto mount dir with connector etc ):

• download connector from https://www.confluent.io/connector/kafka-connect-jdbc/, unpack zip

• put contents of zip to directory in path configured in properties file ( shown below in 3rd point ) -

  plugin.path=/plugins
  

  so tree looks something like this:

  /plugins/
  └── jdbcconnector
      └──assets
      └──doc
      └──etc
      └──lib
  

  Note the lib dir where are the dependencies are, one of them is kafka-connect-jdbc-5.0.0.jar

• Now you can try to run connector

  ./connect-standalone.sh connect-standalone.properties jdbc-connector-config.properties
  

  connect-standalone.properties are common properties needed for kafka-connect, in my case:

  bootstrap.servers=localhost:9092
  key.converter=org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter
  value.converter=org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter
  key.converter.schemas.enable=true
  value.converter.schemas.enable=true
  offset.storage.file.filename=/tmp/connect.offsets
  offset.flush.interval.ms=10000
  plugin.path=/plugins
  rest.port=8086
  rest.host.name=127.0.0.1
  

  jdbc-connector-config.properties is more involving, as it's just configuration for this particular connector, you need to dig into connector docs - for jdbc source it is https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/kafka-connect-jdbc/source-connector/source_config_options.html