Friday, May 24, 2013

Installing Cassandra on Mac OS X

I've recently posted some more tips on using Cassandra on Mac OSX: Cassandra on Mac

If you don't already have homebrew then install it from here.

Then it as simple as:

brew install cassandra

This doesn't install the python driver for the cqlsh command line tool. To do this install it first install python if you haven't got it already:

brew install python

This should have also installed pip - the python package manager - so you can then install the cql python module:

pip install cql

Now try and start cqlsh

You might get this:


Python CQL driver not installed, or not on PYTHONPATH.
You might try "easy_install cql".

One second didn't I just install the cql module?

This could be because the Python in your path is the Mac OS X version. Not the version you installed with home brew that has cql. I fixed this by adding /usr/local/bin to the start of my PATH as that is where the brew Python executable lives:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin/:$PATH

Unless you've started cassandra the next time you try cqlsh you'll get:


cqlsh
Connection error: Could not connect to localhost:9160

Now if you do a brew info on cassandra:

brew info cassandra


To have launchd start cassandra at login:
    ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/cassandra/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
Then to load cassandra now:
    launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist

Unless you are going to use cassandra a lot I wouldn't set it to load on startup as it does use a reasonable amount of memory. Instead to just start it off:

launchctl load /usr/local/opt/cassandra/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist 

Finally cqlsh should connect to cassandra:



cqlsh
Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:9160.
[cqlsh 3.0.2 | Cassandra 1.2.5 | CQL spec 3.0.0 | Thrift protocol 19.36.0]
Use HELP for help.
cqlsh> 

Or if you prefer the older cassandra-cli interface to cassandra:


cassandra-cli
Connected to: "Test Cluster" on 127.0.0.1/9160
Welcome to Cassandra CLI version 1.2.5

Type 'help;' or '?' for help.
Type 'quit;' or 'exit;' to quit.

[default@unknown


All done.




11 comments:

Oleg said...

thanks for your clear & helpful guide :)

Steve said...

Great guide!

I am running Mavericks. The brew install left the homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist file in the /usr/local/Cellar/cassandra/ folder, so I cp it over to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

Also, I had to install JDK 7 (JDK, not JRE!) Cassandra won't run on 1.6, which comes with OS X. The failure on 1.6 is pretty nasty -- it loops over and over attempting to start.

Thanks again!

Steve


chbatey said...

Thanks Steve - When I wrote this it was back on Cassandra 1.2 which did run with 1.6, for 2.* it will need 1.7.

Unknown said...

Thanks very much for this blog.

Unknown said...

Nice! tkx

Unknown said...

Hi Christopher,
Fantastic your blog helped.
Downloaded tar.gz file and followed all the instructions thru other step-by-step but that failed.

Merry XMAS. Happy Holidays.
Thanks a lot.

Unknown said...

Hi, which version of Cassandra does it install ? I would like to install the community edition, version 3.

Manuel Kiessling said...

Hi all,

I just found out that one can also use "brew services", which seems to be a nice wrapper around the launchctl stuff:

brew services start cassandra
brew services stop cassandra
brew services restart cassandra

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Hi ,

cqlsh
Connection error: ('Unable to connect to any servers', {'127.0.0.1': error(61, "Tried connecting to [('127.0.0.1', 9042)]. Last error: Connection refused")})


Help .

Ranjitha.prabakar said...

Thank you for the tutorial on installation.. was helpful :)
cassandra