Kafka Broker doesn't find cluster id and creates new one after docker restart

If you are 100% sure you are connecting to the right ZooKeeper and the right Kafka log directories, but for some reason things don't match and you don't feel like losing all your data while trying to recover:

The Kafka data directory (check config/server.properties for log.dirs property, it defaults to /tmp/kafka-logs) contains a file called meta.properties. It contains the cluster ID. Which should have matched the ID registered to ZK. Either edit the file to match ZK, edit ZK to match the file, or delete the file (it contains the cluster id and the broker id, the first is currently broken and the second is in the config file normally). After this minor surgery, Kafka will start with all your existing data, since you didn't delete any data file.

Like this: mv /tmp/kafka-logs/meta.properties /tmp/kafka-logs/meta.properties_old

I had the same issue when using Docker. This issue occurs since Kafka 2.4 because a check was added to see if the Cluster ID in Zookeeper matches. It's storing the cluster id in meta.properties.

This can be fixed by making the Zookeeper data persistent and not only the Zookeeper logs. E.g. with the following config:

volumes:  - ~/kafka/data/zookeeper_data:/var/lib/zookeeper/data  - ~/kafka/data/zookeeper_log:/var/lib/zookeeper/log

You should also remove the meta.properties file in the Kafka logs once so that Kafka retrieves the right cluster id from Zookeeper. After that the IDs should match and you don't have to do this anymore.

You may also run into a snapshot.trust.empty error which was also added in 2.4. You can solve this by either adding the snapshot.trust.empty=true setting or by making the Zookeeper data persistent before doing the upgrade to 2.4.

I have tried most of the answers and found the hard way (loosing all my data and records) what actually works.
For WINDOWS Operating System Only
So as suggested by others we do need to change and set default path for data directories for both

Kafka in server.properties and
Zookeeper in zookeeper.properties

//Remember this is important if you are on windows give double slash .
for kafka
log.dirs=C://kafka_2.13-2.5//data//kafka

Same goes for zookeeper
dataDir=C://kafka_2.13-2.5//data//zookeeper

and obviously you need to create the above listed folders first before setting anything

then try to run zookeeper and Kafka haven't faced the issue since changing the path.
Prior to this I had single "/" which worked only once then changed to "" again this worked also but once.

EDITAnd don't forget to properly kill the process
kafka-server-stop.batand
zookeeper-server-stop.bat