I am trying to check if a topic passed to my "start stream" method is a valid/already existing topic in the Kafka that my program is connected to.
I know Java has the KafkaConsumer.ListTopics, but I'm working with the akka-kafka library and it seems the ConsumerSetting doesn't have the same method. I could have code that executes a script to list the kafka topics using the Kafka-topics --list command, but I would prefer a less janky way than that.
You would have to create the KafkaConsumer
from that Settings object, then you can use the API methods you mentioned.
You should not expose Zookeeper directly to unauthenticated clients.