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Redpanda Self-Hosted Quickstart

Learn how to quickly start working with a cluster in self-hosted Redpanda.

This quickstart introduces you to Redpanda in a self-hosted environment with a minimal setup. Docker Compose provides a straightforward and reproducible setup process, whether you’re exploring Redpanda for the first time or testing new configurations. The option between a single broker and a three-broker setup helps you test Redpanda for simplicity and resilience.

Redpanda in Docker is supported only for development and testing. To deploy self-hosted Redpanda in production, use one of the following environments:

To download the Redpanda binary, see GitHub.

Prerequisites

You need Docker Compose. For installation instructions, see the Docker Compose documentation.

To check if you have Docker Compose installed, run:

docker compose version

You should see the version of Docker Compose that’s installed on your local machine.

Deploy Redpanda

For lightweight testing, you can start a single Redpanda broker, or you can use a more robust example with three Redpanda brokers.

A single broker setup is the simplest way to get Redpanda up and running. It’s ideal for initial exploration, learning, or development environments where high availability and fault tolerance are not critical concerns.

For production environments where you need more resilience, a three-broker setup is recommended. This configuration allows you to leverage Redpanda’s replication capabilities, enhancing the durability and availability of your data.

  • Single Broker

  • Three Brokers

  1. Download the following docker-compose.yml file on your local file system.

    Reveal the YAML content
    docker-compose.yml
    Unresolved include directive in modules/get-started/pages/quick-start.adoc - include::redpanda-labs:docker-compose:attachment$single-broker/docker-compose.yml[]

  2. Run the following in the directory where you saved the docker-compose.yml file:

    docker compose up -d
    [+] Running 4/4
⠿ Network redpanda_network                 Created  0.0s
⠿ Volume "redpanda-quickstart_redpanda-0"  Created  0.0s
⠿ Container redpanda-0                     Started  0.3s
⠿ Container redpanda-console               Started  0.6s

  1. Download the following docker-compose.yml file on your local file system.

    Reveal the YAML content
    docker-compose.yml
    Unresolved include directive in modules/get-started/pages/quick-start.adoc - include::redpanda-labs:docker-compose:attachment$three-brokers/docker-compose.yml[]

  2. Run the following in the directory where you saved the docker-compose.yml file:

    docker compose up -d
    [+] Running 8/8
⠿ Network redpanda_network                  Created  0.0s
⠿ Volume "redpanda-quickstart_redpanda-0"   Created  0.0s
⠿ Volume "redpanda-quickstart_redpanda-1"   Created  0.0s
⠿ Volume "redpanda-quickstart_redpanda-2"   Created  0.0s
⠿ Container redpanda-0                      Started  0.3s
⠿ Container redpanda-console                Started  0.6s
⠿ Container redpanda-1                      Started  0.7s
⠿ Container redpanda-2                      Started  0.7s

Start streaming

To start building a basic streaming application, you can use the rpk command-line tool to create a topic, produce messages to it, and consume messages from it.

Each Redpanda broker comes preinstalled with rpk, so you can use it inside one of the Redpanda broker’s Docker containers, or you can install it on your local machine to test external connectivity. The docker-compose.yml file configured the containers to expose ports on your localhost, so you can communicate with the cluster outside the Docker network.

To use rpk inside the Redpanda broker’s Docker container:

  1. Get information about the cluster:

    docker exec -it redpanda-0 rpk cluster info

  2. Create a topic called chat-room:

    docker exec -it redpanda-0 rpk topic create chat-room

    Output:

    TOPIC       STATUS
chat-room  OK

    If you deployed three brokers, you can configure your topics with a replication factor of three. This replication factor provides high availability and data durability. For more details, see Choose the replication factor.

    docker exec -it redpanda-0 rpk topic create chat-room --replicas 3

  3. Produce a message to the topic:

    docker exec -it redpanda-0 rpk topic produce chat-room

  4. Enter a message, then press Enter:

    Pandas are fabulous!

    Example output:

    Produced to partition 0 at offset 0 with timestamp 1663282629789.

  5. Press Ctrl+C to finish producing messages to the topic.

  6. Consume one message from the topic:

    docker exec -it redpanda-0 rpk topic consume chat-room --num 1

    Your message is displayed along with its metadata:

    {
  "topic": "chat-room",
  "value": "Pandas are fabulous!",
  "timestamp": 1663282629789,
  "partition": 0,
  "offset": 0
}

To test external connectivity using your local machine:

  1. Install rpk on your local machine:

    The rpk binary is not supported on Windows.

    • Linux

    • macOS

    1. Download the rpk archive for Linux, and make sure the version matches your Redpanda version.

      • To download the latest version of rpk:

        curl -LO https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/latest/download/rpk-linux-amd64.zip

      • To download a version other than the latest:

        curl -LO https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/download/v<version>/rpk-linux-amd64.zip

    2. Ensure that you have the folder ~/.local/bin:

      mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

    3. Add it to your $PATH:

      export PATH="~/.local/bin:$PATH"

    4. Unzip the rpk files to your ~/.local/bin/ directory:

      unzip rpk-linux-amd64.zip -d ~/.local/bin/

    5. Run rpk version to display the version of the rpk binary:

      rpk version
      23.3.1 (rev b5ade3f40)

    1. If you don’t have Homebrew installed, install it.

    2. Install rpk:

      brew install redpanda-data/tap/redpanda

    3. Run rpk version to display the version of the rpk binary:

      rpk version
      23.3.1 (rev b5ade3f40)
      This method installs the latest version of rpk, which is supported only with the latest version of Redpanda.

  2. Get information about the cluster to test the connection:

    rpk cluster info -X brokers=127.0.0.1:19092
    The Redpanda broker returns a list of all broker addresses, so rpk can communicate with all brokers directly. Each broker returns its configured advertise-* address that matches the port to which the initial connection has been made.

Explore your topic

To explore your topic, you can use Redpanda Console, which you deployed in the docker-compose.yml file and is running locally on port 8080. Redpanda Console is a developer-friendly web UI for managing and debugging your Redpanda cluster and your applications.

  1. Open Redpanda Console in a web browser.

    An overview of the cluster status, cluster health, and broker details is displayed.

  2. Go to Topics > chat-room.

    The message that you produced to the topic is displayed along with some other details about the topic.

Customize the quickstart

If you want to configure Redpanda or Redpanda Console, you need to customize the example Docker Compose file.

Configure Redpanda in Docker

To configure the Redpanda services with node configuration properties, you can do the following:

  • Pass configuration properties to the --set option in the redpanda start command. For example:

    redpanda:
  command:
    - redpanda
    - start
    - --set pandaproxy_client.retries=6

  • Create a redpanda.yaml file and mount it to the /etc/redpanda/ directory on the redpanda containers. For example, if you create the redpanda.yaml file in a directory called redpanda-mounts, configure the following volume mounts:

    redpanda:
  volumes:
    - ./redpanda-mounts:/etc/redpanda/

Configure Redpanda Console in Docker

To configure the Redpanda Console service with configuration properties, you can do the following:

  • Use environment variables, for example:

    console:
  environment:
    KAFKA_RACKID: rack1

  • Create a redpanda-console-config.yaml file and mount it to the /etc/redpanda/ directory on the redpanda-console container. For example, if you create the redpanda-console-config.yaml file in a directory called console-mounts, configure the following volume mounts:

    console:
  volumes:
    - ./console-mounts:/etc/redpanda/

Clean up

If you don’t want to continue experimenting with your cluster, you can shut it down and delete the containers:

docker compose down

To delete the volumes along with all your cluster data:

docker compose down -v

Next steps

Suggested reading

Explore the rpk commands that you used in this quickstart: