Installing Cassandra RHEL or CentOS Packages¶

Prerequisites¶

Before installing Cassandra make sure the following prerequisites are met:

• Yum Package Management application installed.
• Root or sudo access to the install machine.
• The latest version of Oracle Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 is installed. Java 7 is not recommended.
• Java Native Access (JNA) is required for production installations. See Installing JNA.
• Also see Recommended Settings for Production Installations.

Steps to Install Cassandra¶

The packaged releases create a cassandra user. When starting Cassandra as a service, the service runs as this user.

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

   java -version
   

   Use the latest version of Java 6 on all nodes. Java 7 is not recommended. If you need help installing Java, see Installing the JRE on RHEL or CentOS Systems.

2. (RHEL 5.x/CentOS 5.x only) Make sure you have EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) installed. EPEL contains dependent packages required by DSE, such as jna and jpackage-utils. For both 32- and 64-bit systems:

   $ sudo rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

3. Add a yum repository specification for the DataStax repository in /etc/yum.repos.d. For example:

   $ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/datastax.repo
   

4. In this file add the following lines for the DataStax repository:

   [datastax]
   name= DataStax Repo for Apache Cassandra
   baseurl=http://rpm.datastax.com/community
   enabled=1
   gpgcheck=0
   

5. Install the package using yum.

   $ sudo yum install dsc1.1
   

This installs the DataStax Community distribution of Cassandra and the OpsCenter Community Edition.

Next Steps¶

• Initializing a Multiple Node Cluster in a Single Data Center
• Initializing Multiple Data Center Clusters on Cassandra
• Install Locations