Apache Kafka appends wrong JAVA path

Question

I have installed the OpenJDK Headless JAVA package on a Ubuntu 16.04 which works fine. My JAVA_HOME variable is set to:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java

But when I'm starting Apache Kafka it tries to load JAVA from the wrong path. It looks like it is appending /bin/java to the end of the JAVA_HOME variable.

$ sudo /opt/kafka/kafka_2.11-1.1.0/bin/kafka-server-start.sh /opt/kafka/kafka_2.11-1.1.0/config/server.properties 

/opt/kafka/kafka_2.11-1.1.0/bin/kafka-run-class.sh: line 271: /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java/bin/java: Not a directory
/opt/kafka/kafka_2.11-1.1.0/bin/kafka-run-class.sh: line 271: exec: /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java/bin/java: cannot execute: Not a directory

I tried changing JAVA_HOME to just:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/

But it is still pointing to the same (invalid) java executable.

I then inspected the 271 line in kafka-run-class.sh which says:

exec $JAVA $KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS $KAFKA_JVM_PERFORMANCE_OPTS $KAFKA_GC_LOG_OPTS $KAFKA_JMX_OPTS $KAFKA_LOG4J_OPTS -cp $CLASSPATH $KAFKA_OPTS "$@"

So it looks like it is using the JAVA variable, so I try to export JAVA="/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java" without any luck.

Can anyone explain why this is happening, and how I can solve this?

Solution

1. sudo vi ~/.bashrc
2. Edit your java home to below

   export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/
   export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

3. source ~/.bashrc
4. then start Kafka

    ~/kafka/bin/kafka-server-start.sh ~/kafka/config/server.properties

Comments

[John]

Seems Kafka needs JDK and not JRE. See tutorialspoint.com/apache_kafka/…

[Rico]

I had the same problem an resolved it by setting JAVA_HOME variable.