cppkafka is a high level C++ wrapper for rdkafka, aiming to allow using rdkafka in a simple, less error prone way.
cppkafka provides an API to produce messages as well as consuming messages, but the latter is only supported via the high level consumer API. cppkafka requires rdkakfa >= 0.9.4 in order to use it. Other wrapped functionalities are also provided, like fetching metadata, offsets, etc.
cppkafka tries to add minimal overhead over librdkafka. A very thin wrapper for librdkafka messages is used for consumption so there's virtually no overhead at all.

It's simple!

cppkafka's API is simple to use. For example, this code creates a producer that writes a message into some partition:

#include <cppkafka/producer.h>

using namespace std;
using namespace cppkafka;

int main() {
    // Create the config
    Configuration config = {
        { "metadata.broker.list", "127.0.0.1:9092" }
    };

    // Create the producer
    Producer producer(config);

    // Produce a message!
    string message = "hey there!";
    producer.produce(MessageBuilder("my_topic").partition(0).payload(message));
}

Compiling

In order to compile cppkafka you need:

librdkafka >= 0.9.4
CMake
A compiler with good C++11 support (e.g. gcc >= 4.8). This was tested successfully on g++ 4.8.3.
The boost library. cppkafka only requires boost.optional, which is a header only library, so this doesn't add any additional runtime dependencies.

Now, in order to build, just run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

If you have installed librdkafka on a non standard directory, you can use the RDKAFKA_ROOT_DIR cmake parameter when configuring the project:

cmake .. -DRDKAFKA_ROOT_DIR=/some/other/dir

Note that finding librdkafka will succeed iff there's an include and lib directories inside the specified path, including both the rdkafka.h header and the librdkafka library file.

Using

If you want to use cppkafka, you'll need to link your application with:

cppkafka
rdkafka

Documentation

You can generate the documentation by running make docs inside the build directory. This requires Doxygen to be installed. The documentation will be written in html format at <build-dir>/docs/html/.

Make sure to check the wiki which includes some documentation about the project and some of its features.