Kafka
desktop only The browser sandbox doesn’t allow raw TCP connections, so Kafka — which requires a long-lived TCP session — is available only in the desktop app.
What works
Section titled “What works”- Produce — pick a topic, set headers, send a key + value (text, JSON, or binary).
- Consume — subscribe to a topic, see messages live with partition / offset / timestamp.
- Multiple brokers — bootstrap list, broker discovery happens through the cluster.
- SASL —
PLAIN,SCRAM-SHA-256,SCRAM-SHA-512. - TLS — server certificate validation, optional client certificate (mTLS).
- Compression — gzip / snappy / lz4 / zstd negotiated automatically.
Broker guard
Section titled “Broker guard”The Electron Kafka handler runs every broker address through the same SSRF guard used by HTTP — including the cloud-metadata IP and the IPv6 unique-local range. This guards against a malicious or misconfigured bootstrap.servers aiming traffic at your machine’s metadata endpoint.
- Set the client ID (defaults to
restura) to make your activity easy to spot in broker logs. - For schema-encoded payloads, decode in a test script — Restura doesn’t bundle a Schema Registry client (yet).
Related
Section titled “Related”- Self-hosting — Kafka stays desktop-only even when self-hosting the SPA; the consume/produce path needs Node.
- Capability matrix