Install Cassandra 2.1 on Mac OS X

http://exponential.io/blog/2015/01/28/install-cassandra-2_1-on-mac-os-x/

Install Cassandra 2.1 on Mac OS X

 Akbar S. Ahmed |  Jan 28, 2015

Step-by-step instructions

In this post we will install Cassandra 2.1 as a standalone, single node cluster. A single node cluster is an easy way to get started learning Cassandra on your laptop.

These installation steps show how to install a local copy of Cassandra. The benefits of a local copy are that you do not need root or sudo to install Cassandra, updating versions is quick and easy, and you can control how/when to install updates.

Install the Oracle JDK

Please follow the instructions to Install Oracle Java JDK 7 update 75 on Mac OS X.

Install Cassandra

mkdir -p ~/opt/packages && cd $_

curl -O http://psg.mtu.edu/pub/apache/cassandra/2.1.2/apache-cassandra-2.1.2-bin.tar.gz

gzip -dc apache-cassandra-2.1.2-bin.tar.gz | tar xf -

ln -s ~/opt/packages/apache-cassandra-2.1.2 ~/opt/cassandra

Create data directories for Cassandra

In this step we need to create several directories that are used by Cassandra. Each directory is used by the following configuration variable in conf/cassandra.yaml:

• data_file_directories: ~/opt/cassandra/data/data
• commitlog_directory: ~/opt/cassandra/data/commitlog
• saved_caches_directory: ~/opt/cassandra/data/saved_caches

The logs directory is used by logback which is configured via the conf/logback.xml file.

mkdir -p ~/opt/cassandra/data/data

mkdir -p ~/opt/cassandra/data/commitlog

mkdir -p ~/opt/cassandra/data/saved_caches

mkdir -p ~/opt/cassandra/logs

Add Cassandra to your PATH

Update your PATH to include Cassandra.

open -a TextEdit ~/.bash_profile

Paste the following into your .bash_profile file.

# include locally installed Cassandra in PATH
if [ -d "$HOME/opt" ]; then
    PATH="$PATH:$HOME/opt/cassandra/bin"
fi

Source your .bash_profile file.

source .bash_profile

Start the Cassandra server

We’re going to run Cassandra in the foreground during development. Cassandra will output a lot of information to the terminal when we start the server. However, this information can be useful during development in case there is a problem with the server.

cassandra -f

Press Ctrl + C when you are ready to stop the server.

Getting started with Cassandra

Login to Cassandra with the CQL shell cqlsh.

First, open a new terminal tab by pressing Command + T.

cqlsh

If everything is working then you should see the following message:

[cqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 2.1.2 | CQL spec 3.2.0 | Native protocol v3]
Use HELP for help.
cqlsh>

Congratulations. Cassandra 2.1 is now installed on Mac OS X. In a future post we will write some basic CQL commands to insert, update, delete and select data from Cassandra. Subscribe to our newsletter if you would like a weekly update our the latest posts.