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Introduction

@cookiemonsterdev/kafka-studio is a local web UI for inspecting and interacting with an Apache Kafka cluster — browse and manage topics, tail and produce messages, inspect consumer groups, and watch a live view of traffic moving through the cluster. Launched from the command line and served on localhost. It is built on @cookiemonsterdev/kafka-core and @cookiemonsterdev/kafka-config — no separate protocol implementation, no separate config format.

Status: early. The CLI, HTTP server, and web shell run end to end: the studio can browse, create, and configure topics; produce messages (single sends and rate-limited bursts); browse and tail live messages; inspect consumer groups (members, per-partition lag, offset reset, deletion) and share groups; render a live topology board of cluster activity; and browse read-only ACL, client quota, and transaction state. Every session is authenticated, and --read-only is enforced by the server, not just hidden in the UI — see Security.

Two ways to launch it

  • kafka studio — a command in @cookiemonsterdev/kafka-cli, resolved at runtime: install the studio alongside the CLI and kafka studio launches it, with an install hint if the studio package isn’t present.
  • kafka-studio — the studio’s own standalone binary, usable without the CLI at all.

Both start the same server; see Installation for both paths, and Running it against a broker for pointing it at a real cluster — including a one-command Docker broker for trying it locally.

Next: Installation, Running it against a broker, API reference.