Install

Package Install

Releases are published to pypi and can be installed with pip (or uv, etc)

pip install kafka-python

Releases are also listed at https://github.com/dpkp/kafka-python/releases

For latest bleed-edge code, install from github:

pip install git+https://github.com/dpkp/kafka-python.git

Optional Installs

crc32c

Highly recommended for performance optimization. By default kafka-python calculates record checksums in pure python, but the calculation is somewhat CPU intensive. As throughput increases this can become a bottleneck. Installing the optional crc32c dependency reduces the CPU cost of each check using an optimized C library. See https://pypi.python.org/pypi/crc32c .

pip install 'kafka-python[crc32c]'

zstd

To enable ZSTD compression/decompression, install python-zstandard:

>>> pip install 'kafka-python[zstd]'

lz4

To enable LZ4 compression/decompression, install python-lz4:

>>> pip install 'kafka-python[lz4]'

snappy

To enable Snappy compression/decompression, install python-snappy:

pip install 'kafka-python[snappy]'

Note that python-snappy generally does not publish pre-compiled wheels, so installation may require building the snappy library from source. See https://google.github.io/snappy/ .