title: Why can't kafka producer use the --bootstrap-server flag?
body: <p>I'm trying to understand the difference between the <code>--broker-list</code> and <code>--bootstrap-server</code> flags in Apache Kafka.</p>
  
  <p>When using the kafka command line tools (as described in the <a href="https://kafka.apache.org/quickstart" rel="nofollow noreferrer">quickstart</a>):</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><code>kafka-console-producer.sh</code> requires <code>--broker-list</code> flag</li>
  <li><code>kafka-console-consumer.sh</code> requires <code>--bootstrap-server</code> flag</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Why can't the producer use a <code>bootstrap-server</code> but instead it's required to "manually" provide the list of brokers? Shouldn't the bootstrap server return metadata of all brokers that the producer could connect to?</p>