HBase: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Installation

In this chapter, we will look at how HBase is installed and initially configured. We will see how HBase can be used from the command line for basic operations, such as adding, retrieving, and deleting data.

Note

All of the following assumes you have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. Hadoop and also HBase require at least version 1.6 (also called Java 6), and the recommended choice is the one provided by Oracle (formerly by Sun), which can be found at http://www.java.com/download/. If you do not have Java already or are running into issues using it, please see Java.

Quick-Start Guide

Let us get started with the “tl;dr” section of this book: you want to know how to run HBase and you want to know it now! Nothing is easier than that because all you have to do is download the most recent release of HBase from the Apache HBase release page and unpack the contents into a suitable directory, such as /usr/local or /opt, like so:

$ cd /usr/local
$ tar -zxvf hbase-x.y.z.tar.gz

Setting the Data Directory

At this point, you are ready to start HBase. But before you do so, it is advisable to set the data directory to a proper location. You need to edit the configuration file conf/hbase-site.xml and set the directory you want HBase to write to by assigning a value to the property key named hbase.rootdir:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?>
<configuration>
  <property>
    <name>hbase.rootdir</name>
    <value>file:///<PATH>/hbase</value> ...