Building Strimzi Kafka operator for stretch clusters

The Strimzi community is actively transitioning to KRaft, leading to frequent changes in the main branch. At of the time of writing, Strimzi is in the process of removing ZooKeeper-related code. To ensure stability, we have based our development for stretch clusters on Strimzi 0.44.0.

The prototype code for stretch clusters is available in the following branch. This branch is derived from the Strimzi 0.44.0 release tag. To view the changes made on top of Strimzi 0.44.0, refer to the following comparison link.

Building the operator

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/aswinayyolath/strimzi-kafka-operator.git

Checkout the stretch cluster branch

git checkout strecth-cluster-prototype

Set Docker registry variables

Before building the operator, ensure that the DOCKER_ORG and DOCKER_REGISTRY environment variables are set correctly. These should match your Docker Hub username and the Docker registry you are using. If DOCKER_REGISTRY is unset, it defaults to docker.io.

For more details, refer to the Strimzi developer guide.

export DOCKER_ORG=<your_docker_hub_username>
export DOCKER_REGISTRY=<your_docker_registry>  # Defaults to docker.io if unset

Build the operator

Since this is a prototype, we have not implemented test coverage yet. To avoid test compilation errors during the build process, disable test execution:

DOCKER_PLATFORM="--platform linux/amd64" make MVN_ARGS='-Dmaven.test.skip=true' all

Testing the operator image without building

If you prefer to test the operator without building it from source, you can use the pre-built image available on Docker Hub:

aswinayyolath/stretchcluster:latest

A detailed guide on testing the stretch cluster will be provided in a later section.