Debezium is very flexible - each connector can be configured and fine-tuned in various ways. Debezium UI already exposes an extensive list of properties that are segregated under different steps for configuration. However, despite the UI exposing a wide range of properties, there are situations where additional custom properties may be necessary beyond those exposed out of the box. For example, producer., consumer., and even driver.* properties are pass-through configuration options for configuring parts of the Kafka Connect pipeline or the JDBC driver, respectively.

Example

Debezium must configure the Kafka producer settings to write schema change events to the schema history topic for connectors that utilize a schema history topic, like MySQL. The connector configuration includes a subset of options that act as pass-through properties that begin with the schema.history.internal.producer.* prefix.

Debezium strips the prefix from the property names before passing the properties to the Kafka client.

The Debezium UI allows you to configure additional properties for connectors not exposed in the UI. For this, we have created a new extra step called Custom Properties in the configuration wizard.

The custom properties step allows you to provide the additional properties by entering a key-value pair. Once you enter the additional configuration properties key and value, click the Apply button.

When clicking the Apply button, the UI validates the user entries and provides feedback if there are any problems. If there are no problems, the UI will show a green check icon on the right side of all the successfully added additional properties. You can also remove any added property by clicking on the Remove button on the right side of the property.

On the left-hand side, you can see the list of already configured properties from the previous wizard step, and the newly added custom properties in this step are highlighted in blue color.

In the screenshot above, the user added schema.history.internal.producer.* related additional properties.

You can try out configuring the connector with some custom properties (and more) with our self-contained example UI demo - which is included under debezium-examples on GitHub. The UI demo includes a Docker Compose file, which brings up several sources with data and the UI. Please refer to the README file for more details on running the Debezium UI demo.

To learn more about the Debezium UI, please refer to the reference documentation.

Stay tuned for further improvements and new feature announcements in the UI in the coming releases.

A big thank you to the team who have contributed in many ways: Anisha Mohanty, René Kerner and Chrish Cranford!