Bring Kafka along for the terminal ride. Kaskade gives you a stylish, keyboard-friendly way to explore clusters, manage topics, and consume records.

Screenshots

Admin	Consumer

Features

Kafka administration

Browse topics, partitions, consumer groups, and group members
Inspect topic lag, replicas, and record counts
Create, edit, delete, and filter topics
Refresh topic metadata and metrics automatically or manually
Copy topic names to the clipboard

Record consumption

Deserialize keys and values as bytes, JSON, string, integer, long, float, boolean, or double
Filter records by key, value, header, or partition
Start from the earliest offsets or explicit partition/offset selections
Keep malformed keys or values inspectable with visible BYTES fallback warnings
Copy or export individual records as JSON
Deserialize Avro and JSON data with Schema Registry
Deserialize Avro and Protobuf data without Schema Registry

Terminal experience

Customize themes and keybindings
Copy data through an OSC 52-compatible terminal

Current limitations

Topic replication factors cannot be changed
Schema Registry does not support Protobuf
Clipboard integration requires an OSC 52-compatible terminal

Quick start

Homebrew

brew install kaskade

pipx

pipx install kaskade

Connect to Kafka

Admin view:

kaskade admin -b my-kafka:9092

Consumer view:

kaskade consumer -b my-kafka:9092 -t my-topic

Usage

For configuration and usage examples, see the Kaskade usage guide.

Development

For development instructions, see the Kaskade development guide.

Releases

See GitHub Releases for release notes and downloadable artifacts.

Questions

For Q&A go to GitHub Discussions.

Security

Report suspected vulnerabilities privately by following the Kaskade security policy.

Donations

If Kaskade is useful to you, consider supporting its development on GitHub Sponsors.

AI Assistance

This project uses AI-assisted development tools. Some code and documentation may be generated or revised with AI assistance. All AI-assisted changes are reviewed and tested by the maintainer before they are included.