Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Installing Cassandra

For those among us who like instant gratification, we’ll start by installing Cassandra. Because Cassandra introduces a lot of new vocabulary, there might be some unfamiliar terms as we 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 understand Cassandra in its larger context.

Installing the Apache Distribution

Cassandra is available for download from the Web at http://cassandra.apache.org. Just click the link on the home page to download a version as a gzipped tarball. Typically two versions of Cassandra are provided. The latest release is recommended for those starting new projects not yet in production. The most stable release is the one recommended for production usage. 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 is around 23MB.

Extracting the Download

The simplest way to get started is to download the prebuilt binary. You can unpack the compressed file using any regular ZIP utility.  On Unix-based systems such as Linux or MacOS, GZip extraction utilities should be preinstalled; on Windows, you’ll need to get a program such as WinZip, which is commercial, or something like 7-Zip, which is freeware.

Open your extracting program. You might have to extract the ZIP file and the TAR file in separate ...