Managing Kafka Topic with spring

In spring it is possible to create topics during the start of the application using beans:

@Bean
public KafkaAdmin admin() {
    Map<String, Object> configs = new HashMap<>();
    configs.put(AdminClientConfig.BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS_CONFIG,
            StringUtils.arrayToCommaDelimitedString(kafkaEmbedded().getBrokerAddresses()));
    return new KafkaAdmin(configs);
}

@Bean
public NewTopic topic1() {
    return new NewTopic("foo", 10, (short) 2);
}

Alternatively you can write your own create topics by autowiring the AdminClient, so for instance reading the list from an input file or specify advanced properties such as partition numbers:

@Autowired
private KafkaAdmin admin;
//...your implementation

Also note that since Kafka 1.1.0 auto.create.topics.enable is enabled by default (see Broker configs).

For more information refer to the spring-kafka docs

To automatically create a Kafka topic in Spring Boot, only this is required:

@Bean
public NewTopic topic1() {
    return new NewTopic("foo", 10, (short) 2);

    //foo: topic name
    //10: number of partitions
    //2: replication factor
}

The Kafka Admin is being automatically created and configured by Spring Boot.

Version 2.3 of Spring Kafka introduced a TopicBuilder class, to make building topics fluent and more intuitive:

@Bean
public NewTopic topic(){
    return TopicBuilder.name("foo")
        .partitions(10)
        .replicas(2)
        .build();
}