# New blog: Defining custom topic properties with Kafka Connect source connectors

**URL:** <https://forum.confluent.io/t/new-blog-defining-custom-topic-properties-with-kafka-connect-source-connectors/403>\
**Category:** Kafka Connect\
**Created:** [6 January 2021 14:20 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/new-blog-defining-custom-topic-properties-with-kafka-connect-source-connectors/403 "2021-01-06T14:20:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rmoff](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.confluent.io/rmoff/32/3_2.png) [@rmoff](https://forum.confluent.io/u/rmoff)\
**Post date:** [6 January 2021 14:20 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/new-blog-defining-custom-topic-properties-with-kafka-connect-source-connectors/403/1 "2021-01-06T14:20:16Z")

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When Kafka Connect ingests data from a source system into Kafka it writes it to a topic. Assuming you have set auto.create.topics.enable = true then it will create these topics for you, and do so using the defaults configured on the broker for topic creation, including num.partitions and default.replication.factor .

There are many other topic-level configurations which you may want to set for topics that are automatically created by Kafka Connect. This is particularly true for connectors which are creating a large number of topics, or where the topic name is not known in advance (e.g. when using a regex to select objects from the source system) and thus cannot be pre-created with the desired settings. Common settings for a topic that you may want to customise include cleanup.policy , min.insync.replicas , and compression.type .

KIP-158 was implemented in Apache Kafka 2.6 (available with Confluent Platform 6.0), and adds the ability to set topic-level configurations for topics created by Kafka Connect source connectors.

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**Read more:** [Defining custom topic properties with Kafka Connect source connectors](https://rmoff.net/2021/01/06/defining-custom-topic-properties-with-kafka-connect-source-connectors/)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rmoff](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.confluent.io/rmoff/32/3_2.png) [@rmoff](https://forum.confluent.io/u/rmoff)\
**Post date:** [9 February 2021 13:29 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/new-blog-defining-custom-topic-properties-with-kafka-connect-source-connectors/403/2 "2021-02-09T13:29:17Z")

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Closed on 9 February 2021 13:29 UTC