Kafka uses ZooKeeper so you need to first start a ZooKeeper server if you don’t already have one.
If you do not want to install and have a separate zookeeper server, you can use the convenience script packaged with kafka to get a quick-and-dirty single-node ZooKeeper instance.
Starting the single-node Zookeeper instance:
bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties
Starting the Kafka Server:
bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties
Listing the Topics available in Kafka:
bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181