Installing the Cassandra binary tarball distribution¶

Prerequisites¶

Before installing Cassandra make sure the following prerequisites are met:

• 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.

  Note

  If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, you need to update to JNA 3.4, as described in Install JNA on Ubuntu 10.04.

Steps to install Cassandra¶

1. Download the Cassandra DataStax Community tarball:

   $ curl -OL http://downloads.datastax.com/community/dsc.tar.gz
   

2. 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 Debian or Ubuntu Systems.

3. Unpack the distribution:

   $ tar -xvzf dsc.tar.gz
   $ rm *.tar.gz
   

4. By default, Cassandra installs files into the /var/lib/cassandra and /var/log/cassandra directories.

   If you do not have root access to the default directories, ensure you have write access as follows:

   $ sudo mkdir /var/lib/cassandra
   $ sudo mkdir /var/log/cassandra
   $ sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP /var/lib/cassandra
   $ sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP /var/log/cassandra
   

Next steps¶

• Initializing a multiple node cluster
• Install locations