How to handle poison pills in Kafka

Example project for my blogpost about Kafka poison pills: https://stephantromer.dev/how-to-handle-poison-pills-in-kafka.

Libraries used

• Java 14
• Spring Boot 2.5.0
• Spring Kafka 2.7.1
• Gradle 6.8
• Docker with Kafka

Projects

This repository contains two projects:

• kafka-poison-pill: This folder contains the code that simulates a poison pill.
• kafka-poison-pill-error-handling: This folder contains the code that shows how to configure an ErrorHandlingDeserializer.

The project also contains a docker-compose.yml file that you can use to setup Kafka locally in case you haven’t already configured Kafka yourself.

Usage

After building and starting one of the applications, the poison pill can be triggered by running following command or pasting the url in your browser to trigger the poison pill:

curl http://localhost:8080/produce-order

Dead letter topic

In the kafka-poison-pill-error-handling project dead letter topics can be enabled by setting the property spring.kafka.dlt.enable to true.