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The Pulsar admin interface

The Pulsar admin interface enables you to manage all important entities in a Pulsar instance, such as tenants, topics, and namespaces.

You can interact with the admin interface via the following methods.

tip

The REST API is the admin interface. Both the pulsar-admin CLI tool and the Java client use the REST API. If you implement your own admin interface client, you should use the REST API.

  • The pulsar-admin CLI tool, which is available in the bin folder of your Pulsar installation:


    bin/pulsar-admin

    Important

    For the latest and complete information about Pulsar admin, including commands, flags, descriptions, and more information, see Pulsar admin doc.

  • HTTP calls, which are made against the admin REST API provided by Pulsar brokers. For some RESTful APIs, they might be redirected to the owner brokers for serving with 307 Temporary Redirect, hence the HTTP callers should handle 307 Temporary Redirect. If you use curl commands, you should specify -L to handle redirections.

    Important

    For the latest and complete information about REST API, including parameters, responses, samples, and more, see REST API doc.

  • A Java client interface.

    Important

    For the latest and complete information about Java admin API, including classes, methods, descriptions, and more, see Java admin API doc.

Admin setup​

Each of Pulsar's three admin interfaces---the pulsar-admin CLI tool, the Java admin API, and the REST API ---requires some special setup if you have authentication enabled in your Pulsar instance.

If you have authentication enabled, you will need to provide an auth configuration to use the pulsar-admin tool. By default, the configuration for the pulsar-admin tool is found in the conf/client.conf file. Here are the available parameters:

NameDescriptionDefault
webServiceUrlThe web URL for the cluster.http://localhost:8080/
brokerServiceUrlThe Pulsar protocol URL for the cluster.pulsar://localhost:6650/
authPluginThe authentication plugin.
authParamsThe authentication parameters for the cluster, as a comma-separated string.
useTlsWhether or not TLS authentication will be enforced in the cluster.false
tlsAllowInsecureConnectionAccept untrusted TLS certificate from client.false
tlsTrustCertsFilePathPath for the trusted TLS certificate file.

How to define Pulsar resource names when running Pulsar in Kubernetes​

If you run Pulsar Functions or connectors on Kubernetes, you need to follow Kubernetes naming convention to define the names of your Pulsar resources, whichever admin interface you use.

Kubernetes requires a name that can be used as a DNS subdomain name as defined in RFC 1123. Pulsar supports more legal characters than Kubernetes naming convention. If you create a Pulsar resource name with special characters that are not supported by Kubernetes (for example, including colons in a Pulsar namespace name), Kubernetes runtime translates the Pulsar object names into Kubernetes resource labels which are in RFC 1123-compliant forms. Consequently, you can run functions or connectors using Kubernetes runtime. The rules for translating Pulsar object names into Kubernetes resource labels are as below:

  • Truncate to 63 characters

  • Replace the following characters with dashes (-):

    • Non-alphanumeric characters

    • Underscores (_)

    • Dots (.)

  • Replace beginning and ending non-alphanumeric characters with 0

tip
  • If you get an error in translating Pulsar object names into Kubernetes resource labels (for example, you may have a naming collision if your Pulsar object name is too long) or want to customize the translating rules, see customize Kubernetes runtime.
  • For how to configure Kubernetes runtime, see here.