Not sure if there's a convenient way, but you can just inspect your kafka/libs folder. You should see files like kafka_2.10-0.8.2-beta.jar, where 2.10 is Scala version and 0.8.2-beta is Kafka version.

Kafka 2.0 have the fix(KIP-278) for it:

kafka-topics.sh --version 

Or

kafka-topics --version

Using confluent utility:

Kafka version check can be done with confluent utility which comes by default with Confluent platform(confluent utility can be added to cluster separately as well - credits cricket_007).

${confluent.home}/bin/confluent version kafka

Checking the version of other Confluent platform components like ksql schema-registry and connect

[confluent-4.1.0]$ ./bin/confluent version kafka
1.1.0-cp1

[confluent-4.1.0]$ ./bin/confluent version connect
4.1.0

[confluent-4.1.0]$ ./bin/confluent version schema-registry
4.1.0

[confluent-4.1.0]$ ./bin/confluent version ksql-server
4.1.0

There is nothing like kafka --version at this point. So you should either check the version from your kafka/libs/ folder or you can run

find ./libs/ -name \*kafka_\* | head -1 | grep -o '\kafka[^\n]*'

from your kafka folder (and it will do the same for you). It will return you something like kafka_2.9.2-0.8.1.1.jar.asc where 0.8.1.1 is your kafka version.

There are several methods to find kafka version

Method 1 simple:-

ps -ef|grep kafka

it will displays all running kafka clients in the console... Ex:- /usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/bin/../libs/kafka-clients-0.10.0.2.5.3.0-37.jar we are using 0.10.0.2.5.3.0-37 version of kafka

Method 2:- go to

cd /usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/libs
ll |grep kafka

Ex:- kafka_2.10-0.10.0.2.5.3.0-37.jar kafka-clients-0.10.0.2.5.3.0-37.jar

same result as method 1 we can find the version of kafka using in kafka libs.

You can grep the logs to see the version. Let's say kafka is installed under /usr/local/kafka, then:

$ grep "Kafka version" /usr/local/kafka/logs/*

/usr/local/kafka/logs/kafkaServer.out: INFO Kafka version : 0.9.0.1 (org.apache.kafka.common.utils.AppInfoParser)

will reveal the version

If you want to check the version of a specific Kafka broker, run this CLI on the broker*

kafka-broker-api-versions.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --version

where localhost:9092 is the accessible <hostname|IP Address>:<port> this API will check (localhost can be used if it's the same host you're running this command on). Example of output:

2.4.0 (Commit:77a89fcf8d7fa018)

* Apache Kafka comes with a variety of console tools in the ./bin sub-directory of your Kafka download; e.g. ~/kafka/bin/

Simple way on macOS e.g. installed via homebrew

$ ls -l $(which kafka-topics)
/usr/local/bin/kafka-topics -> ../Cellar/kafka/0.11.0.1/bin/kafka-topics

You can use for Debian/Ubuntu:

dpkg -l|grep kafka

Expected result should to be like:

ii  confluent-kafka-2.11                   0.11.0.1-1                                 all          publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-elasticsearch  3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect connector for copying data between Kafka and Elasticsearch
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-hdfs           3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect connector for copying data between Kafka and Hadoop HDFS
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-jdbc           3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect connector for JDBC-compatible databases
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-replicator     3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect connector for replicating topics between Kafka clusters
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-s3             3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect S3 connector for copying data between Kafka and
ii  confluent-kafka-connect-storage-common 3.3.1-1                                    all          Kafka Connect Storage Common contains packages used by storage
ii  confluent-kafka-rest                   3.3.1-1                                    all          A REST proxy for Kafka

go to kafka/libs folder we can see multiple jars search for something similar kafka_2.11-0.10.1.1.jar.asc in this case the kafka version is 0.10.1.1

I found an easy way to do this without searching directories or log files:

kafka-dump-log --version

Output looks like this:

5.3.0-ccs (Commit:6481debc2be778ee)

When you install Kafka in Centos7 with confluent :

yum install confluent-platform-oss-2.11

You can see the version of Kafka with :

yum deplist confluent-platform-oss-2.11

You can read : confluent-kafka-2.11 >= 0.10.2.1

To find the Kafka Version, We can use the jps command which show all the java processes running on the machine.

Step 1: Let's say, you are running Kafka as the root user, so login to your machine with root and use jps -m. It will show the result like

4979 Jps -m
9434 Kafka config/server.properties

Step 2: From the above result, you can take the PID for Kafka application and use pwdx 9434 which reports the current directory of the process. the result will be like

9434: /apps/kafka_2.12-2.4.0

here you can see the Kafka version which is 2.12-2.4.0

cd kafka

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --version

You can also type

cat /build.info

This will give you an output like this

BUILD_BRANCH=master
BUILD_COMMIT=434160726dacc4a1a592fe6036891d6e646a3a4a
BUILD_TIME=2017-05-12T16:02:04Z
DOCKER_REPO=
KAFKA_VERSION=0.10.2.1
CP_VERSION=3.2.1

To check kafka version :

cd /usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/libs
ls kafka_*.jar