If you have "auto.create.topics.enable" set to "true" (default), producing to a topic creates it.
Its a bit tricky because the "send" that creates the topic can fail with "leader not found" or similar issue. retrying few times will eventually succeed as the topic gets created and the leader gets elected. Is it possible that you are not getting errors because you are using async producer? Also "no messages are delivered" can have many causes. Check if the topic exists using: bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181 Perhaps the topic was created and the issue is elsewhere (the consumer is a usual suspect! perhaps look in the FAQ for tips with that issue) Gwen On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Mohit Anchlia <mohitanch...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is Kafka supposed to throw exception if topic doesn't exist? It appears > that there is no exception thrown even though no messages are delivered and > there are errors logged in Kafka logs.