Installing Cassandra¶
Prerequisites¶
- The latest version of Java 8, either the Oracle Java Standard Edition 8 or OpenJDK 8. To
verify that you have the correct version of java installed, type
java -version
. - For using cqlsh, the latest version of Python 2.7. To verify that you have
the correct version of Python installed, type
python --version
.
Installation from binary tarball files¶
- Download the latest stable release from the Apache Cassandra downloads website.
- Untar the file somewhere, for example:
tar -xzvf apache-cassandra-3.6-bin.tar.gz
The files will be extracted into apache-cassandra-3.6
, you need to substitute 3.6 with the release number that you
have downloaded.
- Optionally add
apache-cassandra-3.6\bin
to your path. - Start Cassandra in the foreground by invoking
bin/cassandra -f
from the command line. Press “Control-C” to stop Cassandra. Start Cassandra in the background by invokingbin/cassandra
from the command line. Invokekill pid
orpkill -f CassandraDaemon
to stop Cassandra, where pid is the Cassandra process id, which you can find for example by invokingpgrep -f CassandraDaemon
. - Verify that Cassandra is running by invoking
bin/nodetool status
from the command line. - Configuration files are located in the
conf
sub-directory. - Since Cassandra 2.1, log and data directories are located in the
logs
anddata
sub-directories respectively. Older versions defaulted to/var/log/cassandra
and/var/lib/cassandra
. Due to this, it is necessary to either start Cassandra with root privileges or changeconf/cassandra.yaml
to use directories owned by the current user, as explained below in the section on changing the location of directories.
Installation from Debian packages¶
- Add the Apache repository of Cassandra to
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/cassandra.sources.list
, for example for version 3.6:
echo "deb http://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/debian 36x main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cassandra.sources.list
- Add the Apache Cassandra repository keys:
curl https://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/KEYS | sudo apt-key add -
- Update the repositories:
sudo apt-get update
- If you encounter this error:
GPG error: http://www.apache.org 36x InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A278B781FE4B2BDA
Then add the public key A278B781FE4B2BDA as follows:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key A278B781FE4B2BDA
and repeat sudo apt-get update
. The actual key may be different, you get it from the error message itself. For a
full list of Apache contributors public keys, you can refer to this link.
- Install Cassandra:
sudo apt-get install cassandra
- You can start Cassandra with
sudo service cassandra start
and stop it withsudo service cassandra stop
. However, normally the service will start automatically. For this reason be sure to stop it if you need to make any configuration changes. - Verify that Cassandra is running by invoking
nodetool status
from the command line. - The default location of configuration files is
/etc/cassandra
. - The default location of log and data directories is
/var/log/cassandra/
and/var/lib/cassandra
.