How to get latest offset for a partition for a kafka topic?

Question

I am using the Python high level consumer for Kafka and want to know the latest offsets for each partition of a topic. However I cannot get it to work.

from kafka import TopicPartition
from kafka.consumer import KafkaConsumer

con = KafkaConsumer(bootstrap_servers = brokers)
ps = [TopicPartition(topic, p) for p in con.partitions_for_topic(topic)]

con.assign(ps)
for p in ps:
    print "For partition %s highwater is %s"%(p.partition,con.highwater(p))

print "Subscription = %s"%con.subscription()
print "con.seek_to_beginning() = %s"%con.seek_to_beginning()

But the output I get is

For partition 0 highwater is None
For partition 1 highwater is None
For partition 2 highwater is None
For partition 3 highwater is None
For partition 4 highwater is None
For partition 5 highwater is None
....
For partition 96 highwater is None
For partition 97 highwater is None
For partition 98 highwater is None
For partition 99 highwater is None
Subscription = None
con.seek_to_beginning() = None
con.seek_to_end() = None

I have an alternate approach using assign but the result is the same

con = KafkaConsumer(bootstrap_servers = brokers)
ps = [TopicPartition(topic, p) for p in con.partitions_for_topic(topic)]

con.assign(ps)
for p in ps:
    print "For partition %s highwater is %s"%(p.partition,con.highwater(p))

print "Subscription = %s"%con.subscription()
print "con.seek_to_beginning() = %s"%con.seek_to_beginning()
print "con.seek_to_end() = %s"%con.seek_to_end()

It seems from some of the documentation that I might get this behaviour if a fetch has not been issued. But I cannot find a way to force that. What am I doing wrong?

Or is there a different/simpler way to get the latest offsets for a topic?

Answer 1

Finally after spending a day on this and several false starts, I was able to find a solution and get it working. Posting it her so that others may refer to it.

from kafka import SimpleClient
from kafka.protocol.offset import OffsetRequest, OffsetResetStrategy
from kafka.common import OffsetRequestPayload

client = SimpleClient(brokers)

partitions = client.topic_partitions[topic]
offset_requests = [OffsetRequestPayload(topic, p, -1, 1) for p in partitions.keys()]

offsets_responses = client.send_offset_request(offset_requests)

for r in offsets_responses:
    print "partition = %s, offset = %s"%(r.partition, r.offsets[0])