Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3. Installing Cassandra

For those among us who like instant gratification, let’s start by installing Cassandra. Because Cassandra introduces a lot of new vocabulary, there might be some unfamiliar terms as you walk through this. That’s OK; the idea here is to get set up quickly in a simple configuration to make sure everything is running properly. This will serve as an orientation. Then, we’ll take a step back and explain Cassandra in its larger context.

Installing the Apache Distribution

While there are a number of options available for installing Cassandra on various operating systems, let’s start your journey by downloading the Apache distribution from http://cassandra.apache.org so you can get a good look at what’s inside. We’ll explore other installation options in “Other Cassandra Distributions”.

Click the link on the Cassandra home page to download a version as a gzipped archive. Typically, multiple versions of Cassandra are provided. The latest version is the current recommended version for use in production. There are other supported releases that are still viable for production usage and receive bug fixes. The project goal is to limit the number of supported releases, but reasonable accommodations are made. For example, the 2.2 and 2.1 releases were considered to be officially maintained through the release of 4.0. For all releases, the prebuilt binary is named apache-cassandra-x.x.x-bin.tar.gz, where x.x.x represents the version number. The download for Cassandra ...