Quickstart

Here's a minimal example that generates data to Kafka to get you up and running.

Up and running

Create a license file

Create a license.env file with your license variables. If you don't have one yet, you can get one here for free.

LICENSE_ID=xxx
LICENSE_EMAIL=xxx
LICENSE_ORGANIZATION=xxx
LICENSE_EDITION=xxx
LICENSE_EXPIRATION=xxx
LICENSE_SIGNATURE=xx

Set the configuration

Create a hello-world.json file with this configuration. Don’t worry about the connection details, as you'll see in a minute.

{
  "generators": [
    {
      "topic": "testTopic",
      "value": {
        "emoji": {
          "_gen": "oneOf",
          "choices": [
            "👍", "🔥", "❤️"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "connections": {
    "localKafka": {
      "kind": "kafka",
      "producerConfigs": {
        "bootstrap.servers": "localhost:9092",
        "key.serializer" : "io.shadowtraffic.kafka.serdes.JsonSerializer",
        "value.serializer" : "io.shadowtraffic.kafka.serdes.JsonSerializer"
      }
    }
  }
}

Launch ShadowTraffic

Launch ShadowTraffic in watch mode (--watch).

This command will print out 10 example events and then stop. Every time you change your config file, it'll rerun.

The --stdout flag sends all generated data to your terminal, so it doesn't write to Kafka, giving you an interactive development flow. Note that --stdout, --watch, and --sample are all non-mandatory flags.

docker run --env-file license.env -v $(pwd)/hello-world.json:/home/config.json shadowtraffic/shadowtraffic:latest --config /home/config.json --watch --sample 10 --stdout

Connect to Kafka

Update your configuration file to connect to a live Kafka instance, then rerun the Docker command without --stdout, --sample, and --watch. Data should flow into your topic.

If your Kafka broker is running on localhost, you may need to turn off Docker networking with --net=host so the broker endpoint is resolvable.

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Want to learn more? Try the video guides or the cheat sheet.