Running docker on apple silicon is still somehow a struggle, here are some notes about how to set native kafka with KRaft on macos docker-free and suitable for development.

Install & baseline

• brew install kafka
• Homebrew puts configs in /opt/homebrew/etc/kafka/ and binaries in /opt/homebrew/Cellar/kafka/<version>/bin.

Switch the config to KRaft with custom ports

Replace the default ZooKeeper config with the KRaft template and move off the default ports (I used 19092/19093 to keep 9092/9093 free):

sudo cp /opt/homebrew/Cellar/kafka/4.1.1/libexec/config/kraft/server.properties \
  /opt/homebrew/etc/kafka/server.properties

Open /opt/homebrew/etc/kafka/server.properties and set these lines (create them if missing):

• listeners=PLAINTEXT://:19092,CONTROLLER://:19093
• advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://localhost:19092,CONTROLLER://localhost:19093
• controller.quorum.voters=1@localhost:19093
• log.dirs=/opt/homebrew/var/lib/kraft-dev-logs

Format the storage directory

KRaft needs a formatted metadata log. Clear any old data (I had it from previous installation, and it was not removed with brew uninstall kafka for whatever reason) and format with a new cluster id:

sudo rm -rf /opt/homebrew/var/lib/kraft-dev-logs
sudo mkdir -p /opt/homebrew/var/lib/kraft-dev-logs
CLUSTER_ID=$(/opt/homebrew/Cellar/kafka/4.1.1/bin/kafka-storage random-uuid)
sudo /opt/homebrew/Cellar/kafka/4.1.1/bin/kafka-storage format \
  --cluster-id "$CLUSTER_ID" \
  --config /opt/homebrew/etc/kafka/server.properties

Start and verify (manual run)

Launch manually to keep control of ports and logs:

kafka-server-start /opt/homebrew/etc/kafka/server.properties

Then, in another shell, create a topic and produce/consume:

kafka-topics --bootstrap-server localhost:19092 --create --topic test
kafka-console-producer --broker-list localhost:19092 --topic test
kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server localhost:19092 --topic test --from-beginning

Notes

• No ZooKeeper is involved; 4.1 ships KRaft-only by default, extra complexity (especially for local dev setup) is gone.
• If you change ports again, update listeners, advertised.listeners, and the port inside controller.quorum.voters together, then rerun the format step.
• For local dev you can skip TLS/SASL; defaults are PLAINTEXT.

Obvious disclaimer, don’t use it in production :)