Delete topic in Kafka 0.8.1.1

It seems that the deletion command was not officially documented in Kafka 0.8.1.x because of a known bug (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1397).

Nevertheless, the command was still shipped in the code and can be executed as:

bin/kafka-run-class.sh kafka.admin.DeleteTopicCommand --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic test

In the meantime, the bug got fixed and the deletion command is now officially available from Kafka 0.8.2.0 as:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --delete --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic test

Andrea is correct. we can do it using command line.

And we still can program it, by

ZkClient zkClient = new ZkClient("localhost:2181", 10000);
zkClient.deleteRecursive(ZkUtils.getTopicPath("test2"));

Actually I do not recommend you delete topic on Kafka 0.8.1.1. I can delete this topic by this method, but if you check log for zookeeper, deletion mess it up.

Deleting topic isn't always working in 0.8.1.1

Deletion should be working in the next release, 0.8.2

kafka-topics.sh --delete --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic your_topic_name

  Topic your_topic_name is marked for deletion.
  Note: This will have no impact if delete.topic.enable is not set to true.

You may also pass in a bootstrap server instead of zookeeper:

kafka-topics.sh --bootstrap-server kafka:9092 --delete --topic your_topic_name

Is it possible to delete a topic?

Jira KAFKA-1397

Add below line in ${kafka_home}/config/server.properties

delete.topic.enable=true

Restart the kafka server with new config:

${kafka_home}/bin/kafka-server-start.sh ~/kafka/config/server.properties

Delete the topics you wish to:

${kafka_home}/bin/kafka-topics.sh --delete  --zookeeper localhost:2181  --topic daemon12