Purge Kafka Topic

Question

Is there a way to purge the topic in kafka?

I pushed a message that was too big into a kafka message topic on my local machine, now I\'m getting an

Answer 1

A lot of great answers over here but among them, I didn't find one about docker. I spent some time to figure out that using the broker container is wrong for this case (obviously!!!)

## this is wrong!
docker exec broker1 kafka-topics --zookeeper localhost:2181 --alter --topic mytopic --config retention.ms=1000

Exception in thread "main" kafka.zookeeper.ZooKeeperClientTimeoutException: Timed out waiting for connection while in state: CONNECTING
        at kafka.zookeeper.ZooKeeperClient.$anonfun$waitUntilConnected$3(ZooKeeperClient.scala:258)
        at scala.runtime.java8.JFunction0$mcV$sp.apply(JFunction0$mcV$sp.java:23)
        at kafka.utils.CoreUtils$.inLock(CoreUtils.scala:253)
        at kafka.zookeeper.ZooKeeperClient.waitUntilConnected(ZooKeeperClient.scala:254)
        at kafka.zookeeper.ZooKeeperClient.(ZooKeeperClient.scala:112)
        at kafka.zk.KafkaZkClient$.apply(KafkaZkClient.scala:1826)
        at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$ZookeeperTopicService$.apply(TopicCommand.scala:280)
        at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.main(TopicCommand.scala:53)
        at kafka.admin.TopicCommand.main(TopicCommand.scala)

and I should have used zookeeper:2181 instead of --zookeeper localhost:2181 as per my compose file

## this might be an option, but as per comment below not all zookeeper images can have this script included
docker exec zookeper1 kafka-topics --zookeeper localhost:2181 --alter --topic mytopic --config retention.ms=1000

the correct command would be

docker exec broker1 kafka-configs --zookeeper zookeeper:2181 --alter --entity-type topics --entity-name dev_gdn_urls --add-config retention.ms=12800000

Hope it will save someone's time.

Also, be aware that the messages won't be deleted immediately and it will happen when the segment of the log will be closed.