Installing the DataStax Community Binaries as User¶

Steps to Install Cassandra¶

1. Check that Java is installed by running the following command in a terminal window:

   java -version
   

   Note

   Any version of Java is fine for installing an evaluation instance. For production deployments, see Installing Oracle JRE.

2. From your home directory, download the Cassandra package (required), and the OpsCenter package(optional):

   For example, on Linux to get the latest versions of DataStax and OpsCenter Community Editions and the Portfolio Demo:

   $ curl -OL http://downloads.datastax.com/community/dsc-cassandra-1.0.9-bin.tar.gz
   $ curl -OL http://downloads.datastax.com/community/opscenter.tar.gz
   

3. Unpack the distributions:

   $ dsc-cassandra-1.0.9-bin.tar.gz
   $ tar -xzvf opscenter.tar.gz
   $ rm *.tar.gz
   

4. Rename the downloaded directory to datastax:

   $ mv dsc-cassandra-1.0.9 datastax
   

5. In the datastax directory, create the data and logging directory for Cassandra.

   $ cd datastax
   $ mkdir cassandra-data
   

6. In cassandra-data, create the following directories: saved_caches and commitlog.

   $ cd cassandra-data
   $ mkdir data
   $ mkdir saved_caches
   $ mkdir commitlog
   

Steps to Configure and Start the Cluster¶

After installing a single-node Cassandra cluster in your home directory, you must set some configuration properties to use the new directory locations. These properties are specified in the cassandra.yaml and log4j-server.properties files.

1. Go the directory containing the cassandra.yaml file:

   $ cd ~/datastax/conf
   

2. Edit the following lines in cassandra.yaml:

   initial_token: 0
   data_file_directories: - ~/datastax/cassandra-data/data
   commitlog_directory: ~/datastax/cassandra-data/commitlog
   saved_caches_directory: ~/datastax/cassandra-data/saved_caches
   

3. In the conf directory, edit the following line in the log4j-server.properties file:

   log4j.appender.R.File= ~/datastax/cassandra-data/system.log
   

4. Start the Cassandra server in the background.

   $ cd ~/datastax
   $ bin/cassandra
   

   Note

   When Cassandra loads, you may notice a message that MX4J will not load and that mx4j-tools.jar is not in the classpath. You can ignore this message. MX4j provides an HTML and HTTP interface to JMX and is not necessary to run Cassandra. DataStax recommends using OpsCenter. It has more monitoring capabilities than MX4J.

5. Check that Cassandra is running by invoking the nodetool utility from the installation home directory:

   $ bin/nodetool ring -h localhost