A simple command line tool to consume partitions of a topic and print the messages on the standard output.
go get github.com/IBM/sarama/tools/kafka-console-consumer
# Minimum invocation
kafka-console-consumer -topic=test -brokers=kafka1:9092
# It will pick up a KAFKA_PEERS environment variable
export KAFKA_PEERS=kafka1:9092,kafka2:9092,kafka3:9092
kafka-console-consumer -topic=test
# You can specify the offset you want to start at. It can be either
# `oldest`, `newest`. The default is `newest`.
kafka-console-consumer -topic=test -offset=oldest
kafka-console-consumer -topic=test -offset=newest
# You can specify the partition(s) you want to consume as a comma-separated
# list. The default is `all`.
kafka-console-consumer -topic=test -partitions=1,2,3
# Display all command line options
kafka-console-consumer -help