How to delete multiple topics in Apache Kafka

Question

Assuming that I have a number of topics with the same prefix, e.g:

giorgos-topic1 giorgos-topic2 giorgos-topic3 ... 

The command used for deleting a single topic (say giorgos-topic1) is the following:

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --delete --topic giorgos-topic1 

Is it possible to delete multiple topics using a single command and possibly a regular expression/wildcard (e.g. giorgos-*) instead of typing all the topic names that need to be deleted one by one?

Answer 1

Yes you can use regex-like expressions when deleting topics with the kafka-topics.sh tool:

For example, to delete all topics starting with giorgos-:

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --delete --topic 'giorgos-.*' 

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Using the Admin APIs, you can also delete several topics at once, see AdminClient.deleteTopics

Answer 2

In cases where regex is not possible we can use a comma seperated list of topic names for the deletion of topics.

kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper 10.0.0.160:2181 --delete --topic giorgos-topic1,giorgos-topic2,giorgos-topic3,...