Skip to main content
Quick navigation

Connecting to Kafka running on Windows WSL 2

Apache Kafka on Windows​

Thanks to WSL 2, Apache Kafka can run properly on Windows. You can read a how-to guide at Confluent.

Conduktor runs on your host network​

If you're running your Apache Kafka brokers using WSL2 and want to connect Conduktor to your brokers, you may run into some errors due to misconfigurations. For instance, if you try to connect to "localhost:9092" or "127.0.0.1:9092" and this does not work, please continue reading.

It's similar to using Docker: Conduktor is running on your host system, on your host network. It is running outside of your internal Docker network, and here, it is running outside of your WSL 2 network. You must "connect" both.

WSL 2 is not "done" yet​

WSL 2 has a few networking issues, which can cause these connectivity issues. Please check for answers:

Two ways to fix this​

IPv6​

  • Use IPv6 loopback address in your broker (server.properties)
listeners=PLAINTEXT://[::1]:9092
  • Same in Conduktor, for your bootstrap address:
[::1]:9092

172.x​

Find the address of your WSL 2 network:

$ ip addr | grep "eth0"
172.x.y.z
  • Use this in your broker (server.properties)
listeners=PLAINTEXT://172.x.y.z:9092
  • Same in Conduktor, for your bootstrap address:
172.x.y.z:9092