How to Delete a topic in apache kafka

Question

I need to delete a topic in kafka-0.8.2.2.3. I have used the below command for deleting the topic:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --delete --topic DummyTopic

The command executed successfully but when I run a command to list the topics, I could see that the topic is still there and it shows marked for deletion.

bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181
DummyTopic - marked for deletion

And when I create the topic DummyTopic it outputs the exception, The topic already exists, below is the stack trace:

Error while executing topic command Topic "DummyTopic" already exists.
kafka.common.TopicExistsException: Topic "DummyTopic" already exists.
    at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.createOrUpdateTopicPartitionAssignmentPathInZK(AdminUtils.scala:248)
    at kafka.admin.AdminUtils$.createTopic(AdminUtils.scala:233)
    at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.createTopic(TopicCommand.scala:92)
    at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.main(TopicCommand.scala:54)
    at kafka.admin.TopicCommand.main(TopicCommand.scala)

Please let me know how can I delete this topic.

Answer 1

Deletion of a topic has been supported since 0.8.2.x version. You have to enable topic deletion (setting delete.topic.enable to true) on all brokers first.

Note: Ever since 1.0.x, the functionality being stable, delete.topic.enable is by default true.

Follow this step by step process for manual deletion of topics

1. Stop Kafka server
2. Delete the topic directory, on each broker (as defined in the logs.dirs and log.dir properties) with rm -rf command
3. Connect to Zookeeper instance: zookeeper-shell.sh host:port
4. From within the Zookeeper instance:
   1. List the topics using: ls /brokers/topics
   2. Remove the topic folder from ZooKeeper using: rmr /brokers/topics/yourtopic
   3. Exit the Zookeeper instance (Ctrl+C)
5. Restart Kafka server
6. Confirm if it was deleted or not by using this command kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper host:port