IBM Event Streams - MQ connector - Handy URL

Last updated: 16 March 2025

IBM has produced high quality documentation around IBM Event Streams, more specifically around MQ source and sink connectors, the focus of this post.

This page contains the URLs I found most useful while learning to create my first IBM Event Streams Kafka MQ source connector.

Source and sink connector starting point

YouTube

If you are new to Kafka connectors like I am, I’d suggest spending a few minutes watching the youtube video Apache Kafka 101: Kafka Connect (2023). I’d actually watch all the Kafka videos from this presenter. They are awesome!

URLs to guide you through the process

High level guides

Perhaps the best starting point is the IBM Event Automation connector URLs on github.io.

The landing URLs contain a high level process to follow when implementing Kafka Connect runtimes and associated Kafka connectors such as the IBM MQ source and sink connectors.

A source connector consumes IBM MQ messages from a queue and publishes them to a Kafka topic.

A sink connector consumes from Kafka topics and puts IBM MQ messages to a queue.

The rest of this post focusses on the IBM MQ to Kafka source connector only.

Releases

Before reading too much, I suggest you have a quick scan of the following URLs.

These URLs contain the IBM provided source and sink connectors, including the connector source code (if you’re interested) together with compiled jar files.

The jar files for the source connector (as of writing this post) are for the v2.3.0 release. Be aware that the following URLs will initiate a download of the jar file.

jar file containing all the dependencies excluding the MQ classes: kafka-connect-mq-source-2.3.0-dependencies-exc-mq.jar
jar file with the dependencies including the MQ classes: kafka-connect-mq-source-2.3.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar
jar file without the dependencies: kafka-connect-mq-source-2.3.0.jar

From what I have heard, this is the new location to obtain the (open source) connectors.

You may be able to obtain older source and sink connectors from Fix Central. However, I do see a comment “Kafka Connect MQ Source old version. For new version visit https://ibm.github.io/event-automation/connectors/kc-source-ibm-mq/installation” which suggests the location may have permanently moved.

If you are interested in working from the IBM MQ perspective refer to following URLs:

You want to download the jar file for the IBM MQ Kafka connector. You’ll need an IBM account to download this file.
Download the IBM MQ Kafka connector. Look for the IBM MQ Kafka Connectors link.

Kafka connect runtime for an IBM MQ source connector

To create a Kafka connect runtime for an IBM MQ source connector, start with the high level process URL:

Install an IBM MQ source connector

This page contains URLs that take you to the appropriate sections to complete your activities. I actually found this a great starting point.

You can happily follow that page rather than read the rest of this post, however, the below adds a few comments to highlight what I focussed on.

You can optionally read the entire page about setting up and running connectors.

For me, I focussed on building a Kafka connect image and deploying to OpenShift.

Kafka MQ source connector

To configure a Kafka MQ source connector, refer to the following URL:

Set up a Kafka connector

The following lists all the properties you can configure.

Configuration options for the Kafka MQ source and sink connectors

To know the Kafka connect MQ source connector image dependencies check out the below URL. I faced some challenges building the image until I discovered this page.

Kafka MQ source connect dependencies