No Kafka to point Alginte at? The playground starts Alginte, a single-node
Kafka (KRaft), and a Schema Registry together, seeded with sample topics,
records, and a consumer group showing real lag — every screen has something to
look at, and nothing is installed beyond the containers.
Then open http://localhost:8888.
The playground binds the UI to 127.0.0.1 only and runs without login — it
serves your machine and nothing else. There are no volumes:
docker compose down is the reset button; up -d reseeds fresh.
What’s inside
Kafka Connect and ksqlDB are not part of the playground — their menu areas hide
when unconfigured, which is the honest state.
From playground to your cluster
The playground is the product — the same image, just pointed at a bundled
broker. When you’re ready, run it against your own Kafka:
Quick Start. 