This will give you a local VM with a single node Kafka installation (+supporting zookeeper). I tested this on a Mac, 10.9.2.

1. install vagrant >= 1.6.1
2. install ansible
3. build and configure the vm: cd kafka-meetup-demo; vagrant up

At that point, you should be able to connect from your local machine to the Kafka broker which is running on the VM. You first need to download and untar Kafka (you don't need to install anything, this is just to get the client programs on your machine):

curl -O http://apache.petsads.us/kafka/0.8.1.1/kafka_2.9.2-0.8.1.1.tgz
tar -zxvf kafka_2.9.2-0.8.1.1.tgz
cd kafka_2.9.2-0.8.1.1

And now you can connect to the Kafka broker which is running on the VM:

# list topics 
bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper 192.168.33.10:2181
# produce
bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list 192.168.33.10:9092 --topic test
# consume
bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --zookeeper 192.168.33.10:2181 --topic test --from-beginning

At this point I ran into problems on my work machine (mac, 10.9.2). Trying to connect to the kafka broker I was getting "can't resolve host" errors. If you run into it, read [this](http://biomedicalontologies.com/2012/11/14/fixing-java-net-local- host-name-unknown-error-on-mac-os-x/) or change your /etc/hosts to map the name you get from scutil --get HostName to 127.0.0.1; my host name is FOOBAR, so my hosts file has a line in it like this:

127.0.0.1	localhost FOOBAR