How to view kafka message

Question

Is there any way I can view the message content sent to kafka for a given topic? Say some thing like view last 5 messages for this topic, if that it possible.

Answer 1

You can use console consumer to view messages produced on some topic:

bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic test --from-beginning

Answer 2

If you're wondering why the original answer is not working. Well it might be that you're not in the home directory. Try this:

$KAFKA_HOME/bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --topic test --from-beginning