How do you create a topic using the Kafka CLI?

The kafka-topics.sh script (bundled with the Kafka distribution) manages topics from the command line, with --create being the most common starting point:

kafka-topics.sh --create \
  --topic orders \
  --partitions 3 \
  --replication-factor 2 \
  --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

The three settings worth understanding: --partitions sets the initial parallelism level for the topic (partitions can be increased later, but never decreased), --replication-factor sets how many copies of each partition exist across the cluster (can't exceed the number of brokers), and --bootstrap-server points the CLI at any broker in the target cluster, which it uses to discover the rest of the cluster's metadata. Related commands follow the same pattern: --list shows existing topics, --describe shows a topic's partition/replica detail, and --alter changes settings like partition count on an existing topic.

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