I noticed when I updated from Docker image version 1.5.0 to 1.8.1 that the CREATE_TOPICS environment variable no longer works.

STARTUP: Creating topic
...
Exception in thread "main" joptsimple.UnrecognizedOptionException: zookeeper is not a recognized option
at joptsimple.OptionException.unrecognizedOption(OptionException.java:108)
at joptsimple.OptionParser.handleLongOptionToken(OptionParser.java:510)
at joptsimple.OptionParserState$2.handleArgument(OptionParserState.java:56)
at joptsimple.OptionParser.parse(OptionParser.java:396)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$TopicCommandOptions.<init>(TopicCommand.scala:517)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand$.main(TopicCommand.scala:47)
at kafka.admin.TopicCommand.main(TopicCommand.scala)

This is likely because --bootstrap-servers option needs to be used instead of --zookeeper with latest Kafka.