Zookeeper error: dataDir is not set

Question

I am using the kafka quickstart tutorial to set a producer-consumer connection. https://kafka.apache.org/quickstart

I have been using this tutorial for a while and it worked perfectly until now. When I run zookeeper:

bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties

I get the following error:

[2017-01-14 18:57:18,148] INFO Reading configuration from: config/server.properties (org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerConfig)
[2017-01-14 18:57:18,159] ERROR Invalid config, exiting abnormally (org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain)
org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerConfig$ConfigException: Error processing config/server.properties
at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerConfig.parse(QuorumPeerConfig.java:123)
at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain.initializeAndRun(QuorumPeerMain.java:101)
at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain.main(QuorumPeerMain.java:78)
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: dataDir is not set
at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerConfig.parseProperties(QuorumPeerConfig.java:243)
at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerConfig.parse(QuorumPeerConfig.java:119)
... 2 more
Invalid config, exiting abnormally

This happened after killing manually some tail processes. How can I overcome this error? I already downloaded a new kafka quickstart folder but the error continues. My zookeeper.config file:

...
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
# the directory where the snapshot is stored.
dataDir=/tmp/zookeeper
# the port at which the clients will connect
clientPort=2181
# disable the per-ip limit on the number of connections since this is a non-production config
maxClientCnxns=0

Thank you!

Answer 1

The guide is actually mistaken ... in order to start Zookeeper you should point to the config/zookeeper.properties file instead.

Answer 2

Your start command says config/zookeeper.properties but your error message references config/server.properties.

Zookeeper should be started with zookeeper.properties and Kafka should be started with server.properties.

Don't get these mixed up or neither will start