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Status

Current state: Under Discussion

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When starting a connector, users must provide the connector configuration. The configuration often also includes configurations for other plugins such as SMTs or converters. Today, Connect does not provide a way to see what plugins are available installed apart from connectors. This make it difficult for users building data pipeline to know which plugins are available and what is possible. Basically they have to know how the Connect runtime is set up. Even once they know the plugins that are available, they then have to go look at the plugins documentation or, in the worst case, look directly at the source code to find their configuration definitions.

Connector plugins should be discoverable via the REST API. Their configuration definitions should also be easily retrieved. This would significantly ease the process of building pipelines and enable building tools and UIs that can manage Connect data pipelines.

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[
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.file.FileStreamSinkConnector",
    "type": "sink",
    "version": "3.2.0"
  },
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.file.FileStreamSourceConnector",
    "type": "source",
    "version": "3.2.0"
  },
   {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.converters.ByteArrayConverter",
    "type": "converter",
    "version": "3.02.0"  
  },
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.transforms.Cast$Value",
    "type": "transformation",
    "version": "3.02.0"
  },
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.transforms.predicates.HasHeaderKey",
    "type": "predicate",
    "version": "3.02.0"  
  },
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.SimpleHeaderConverter",
    "type": "header_converter",
    "version": "3.02.0"
  },
  {
    "class": "org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.SimpleHeaderConverter",
    "type": "converter",
    "version": "3.02.0"
  },   
  ...
]

• GET /connector-plugins/<plugin>/config: This new endpoint will return the configuration definitions of the specified plugin. It will work with all plugins returned by /connector_plugins.

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