Community edition MQTT connecting to external source

Lenses Community Edition
1

Hi,
I have been having trouble connecting the new lenses 6 community edition (docker) to a MQTT source… I found several issues…

When updating the connector configuration, it isn’t always saved…

Also, looking at the docker-compose.yml, there is an inconsistency of the domain url… sometimes it is kafka-demo and others demo-kafka.

I corrected the local compose file and eventually got it working… now I just need to be careful about stopping it.

2

Hello 1Tim, going in reverse order:

Thank you for catching the inconsistency in the compose file. In our tests, it didn’t affect the operation of the containers, but it was a bug nonetheless.

In the latest version of the compose file, we fixed it. Furthermore, we switched to Kafka 3.9 and KRaft and, in general, made things a little faster and lighter. The main improvement is that we expose the broker to the host so you can connect to it from your own app.

Going to the MQTT issue, unfortunately, you did not provide enough details for us to figure out the issue.
Some generic advice:

  • The connector runs inside the Kafka docker container, under the lenses docker network. So, it can connect to the internet, other containers in the lenses docker network, and IP addresses that are routable via the docker host. If you run your MQTT server on your localhost as an example, it wouldn’t be the same localhost as the container’s. You could try to use your IP address (e.g., 192.168.1.10) to see if that works, though it depends on the configuration of your operating system and docker installation.
  • It can be useful to check Connect’s logs. You can do it like this:
    docker exec -it lenses-6-preview-demo-kafka-1 cat /var/log/connect-distributed.log
  • Regarding updating the connector configuration, I will inform our development team. I think that the Connect API doesn’t inform us back when a change cannot be applied due to bad settings.