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Type: BOOLEAN
Explanation: This configuration controls whether the topic is automatically created when subscribing to a non-existent topic. This configuration is only applicable with 0.11 or higher versions of the broker. A topic will be auto-created only if this configuration is set to true and auto-topic creation is enabled on the broker using auto.create.topics.enable; otherwise auto-topic creation is not permitted. This configuration must be set to true when using brokers older than 0.11.
Default Value: TRUE
Priority: MEDIUM

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Whether the topic should be auto-created will be included in MetadataRequest sent by the consumer. In Kafka 0.11.0, MetadataRequest v4 had earlier introduced a way to specify if a topic should be auto-created when requesting metadata for specific topics.

If the broker is old and does not support v4, we will fallback to the default behavior of not specifying auto topic creation; the broker configuration will then control whether we automatically create topics or notolder than 0.11.0, allow.auto.create.topics must be set to true. If set to false in this case, the consumer will throw an InvalidConfigurationException at run-time. Specifically, the exception will be thrown on calling KafkaConsumer#poll after subscribing to a non-existent topic.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

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