作为Kafka消费者的节点

Question

I have searched for packages for Node like this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/kafka and https://www.npmjs.com/package/no-kafka

My question is: Do these packages makes the node.js subscribe to kafka all the time? or Do I need some packages like forever or pm2 to achieve that?

Answer 1

The purpose of something like forever is to keep your node app running all the time (if it should crash).

This is pretty much separate from what those two packages do or don't do. They run inside your node app. If you want them to run all the time, then you need them to be used in a node app that is always running.

You can either write a rock solid node app that doesn't ever crash so it runs continually or you can attempt to do that and also run something like forever so that if your app dies, forever will automatically restart it.

Do these packages makes the node.js subscribe to kafka all the time? or Do I need some packages like forever or pm2 to achieve that?

No. forever and pm2 have no influence on what kafka does or doesn't do. They just make sure your app is restarted if it crashes or exits for some reason.

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If you are using the consumer side of the kafka API, then you will have to do some research and testing to see how good the library is at keeping you connected all the time, even when the server you are connecting to temporarily restarts or there is a temporary internet glitch.

From what I can tell looking at the code for this implementation , if there's an error on an open connection, the connection is just closed and there is no reconnect logic so you would probably have to write reconnect logic by subscribing to either the error or close events and then attempting to reconnect when the connection is lost.