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I see some people adding @EnableKafka to their spring boot application and I was wondering why. I have a working spring boot kafka producer and consumer and I didn't use @EnableKafka. So, why do people need to add it explicitly?

Thank you.

Answers

That is because Spring boot provides an auto configuration for Kafka via KafkaAutoConfiguration class (javadoc). When you use @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication, Spring boot automatically configures Kafka for you.

You can test that by excluding the auto configuration by providing @SpringBootApplication(exclude={KafkaAutoConfiguration.class}), and Spring boot would not automatically configure Kafka for you.

If you don't use Spring boot, then you would have to use @EnableKafka to configure Kafka for your Spring app.