What is Yōzefu?

Yōzefu is designed to be a fast and efficient tool to explore Kafka clusters from the terminal. It aims to provide a user-friendly interface while leveraging the power of the terminal for quick navigation and operations. More details on this blog post.

Yōzefu is a reference to the main character of The Trial, the novel of Franz Kafka.

Features

Achraf offers the following features:

• A real-time access to data published to topics.
• A search query language inspired from SQL providing a fine-grained way filtering capabilities.
• Ability to search kafka records across multiple topics.
• Support for extending the search engine with user-defined filters written in WebAssembly (Extism).
• The tool can be used as a terminal user interface or a CLI with the --headless flag.
• One keystroke to export kafka records for further analysis.
• Support for registering multiple kafka clusters, each with specific kafka consumer properties.

A TUI and a CLI

Yōzefu can be used as an interactive terminal user interface (TUI) or as a command-line interface in headless mode.

TUI mode

yozf --cluster preproduction \
-t my.topic.of.books \
"from begin where key == '978-2070315932' limit 1"

Headless mode

yozf --headless \
-c preproduction \
-t my.topic.of.books \
"from begin where key == '978-2070315932' limit 1" \
--format simple

Limitations

• The tool is designed only to consume kafka records. There is no feature to produce records or manage a cluster.
• Serialization formats such as json, xml or plain text are supported. Avro support is experimental for now. Protobuf is not supported.
• Yōzefu gives you the feeling that every kafka records stays in memory but in reality, it uses a ring buffer to store only the last 500 kafka records.
• There is probably room for improvement regarding the throughput (lot of clone() and deserialization).
• Yōzefu has been tested on macOS Silicon but not on Windows or Linux. Feedback or contributions are welcome.

Features

Yozefu relies on rdkafka for Kafka connectivity. The following table summarizes the features available on each target platform.

Target	cmake-build	curl-static	zstd	ssl-vendored	external-lz4	libz-static	gssapi-vendored
aarch64-apple-darwin	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
x86_64-apple-darwin	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
x86_64-pc-windows-gnu	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Screenshots