Purge Kafka Topic

Is there a way to purge the topic in kafka?

I pushed a message that was too big into a kafka message topic on my local machine, now I'm getting an error:

kafka.common.InvalidMessageSizeException: invalid message size

Increasing the fetch.size is not ideal here, because I don't actually want to accept messages that big.

Temporarily update the retention time on the topic to one second:

kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper <zkhost>:2181 --alter --topic <topic name> --config retention.ms=1000

And in newer Kafka releases, you can also do it with kafka-configs --entity-type topics

kafka-configs.sh --zookeeper <zkhost>:2181 --entity-type topics --alter --entity-name <topic name> --add-config retention.ms=1000

then wait for the purge to take effect (duration depends on size of the topic). Once purged, restore the previous retention.ms value.

To purge the queue you can delete the topic:

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

then re-create it:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 \
    --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic test