Apache Kafka: …StringDeserializer is not an instan

Question

In my simple application i am trying to instantiate a KafkaConsumer my code is nearly a copy of the code from javadoc ("Automatic Offset Committing"):

@Slf4j
public class MyKafkaConsumer {

    public MyKafkaConsumer() {
        Properties props = new Properties();
        props.put("bootstrap.servers", "localhost:9092");
        props.put("group.id", "test");
        props.put("enable.auto.commit", "true");
        props.put("auto.commit.interval.ms", "1000");
        props.put("key.deserializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer");
        props.put("value.deserializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer");
        KafkaConsumer<String, String> consumer = new KafkaConsumer<>(props);
        consumer.subscribe( Arrays.asList("mytopic"));
        while (true) {
            ConsumerRecords<String, String> records = consumer.poll(100);
            for (ConsumerRecord<String, String> record : records)
                log.info( record.offset() + record.key() + record.value() );
                //System.out.printf("offset = %d, key = %s, value = %s%n", record.offset(), record.key(), record.value());
        }
    }
}

If i try to instantiate this i get:

org.apache.kafka.common.KafkaException: Failed to construct kafka consumer
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.<init>(KafkaConsumer.java:781)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.<init>(KafkaConsumer.java:635)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.<init>(KafkaConsumer.java:617)
at ...MyKafkaConsumer.<init>(SikomKafkaConsumer.java:23)
    ...
    Caused by: org.apache.kafka.common.KafkaException: org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer is not an instance of org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.Deserializer
        at org.apache.kafka.common.config.AbstractConfig.getConfiguredInstance(AbstractConfig.java:248)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.KafkaConsumer.<init>(KafkaConsumer.java:680)
        ... 48 more

How to fix this?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is what finally fixed your error, but note that when using spring-kafka-test (version 2.1.x, starting with version 2.1.5) with the 1.1.x kafka-clients jar, you will need to override certain transitive dependencies as follows:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-kafka</artifactId>
    <version>${spring.kafka.version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-kafka-test</artifactId>
    <version>${spring.kafka.version}</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka-clients</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka-clients</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
    <classifier>test</classifier>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka_2.11</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka_2.11</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
    <classifier>test</classifier>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

so it could've been a problem with your transitive dependency for sure

Answer 2

This might be the problem with Kafka classloading.
Setting classloader to null might help.

...
Thread currentThread = Thread.currentThread();    
ClassLoader savedClassLoader = currentThread.getContextClassLoader();

currentThread.setContextClassLoader(null);
KafkaConsumer<String, String> consumer = new KafkaConsumer<>(props);

currentThread.setContextClassLoader(savedClassLoader);
...

There is full explanation:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/50981469/1673775