I posted some time ago about installing Cassandra on Mac OSX. Admittedly I generally use Linux when dealing with Cassandra but have recently been using it on Mac OSX again so here are some tips when working with Cassandra on ac OSX.
Install it with homebrew
It's easy! The only reason for not using homebrew is if you want a specific version. I have an old blog post on
installing it with homebrew here:
install
Cassandra on Mac OSX. If you want 1.2 rather than 2.0 read below first.
The default formula for Cassandra is now 2.0. If you aren't that cutting edge and want to stick to Cassandra
1.2 then you need to do some tinkering. First off do a brew update & tap to the versions branch:
brew update
brew tap homebrew/versions
Now lets see what we get for cassandra:
brew search cassandra
cassandra cassandra-0.6 cassandra12
Homebrew have kindly created three formulas you can work with: 0.6, 1.2 and the latest (currently 2.0). If you want
1.2 simply do:
brew install cassandra12
Rather than brew install Cassandra. By default the brew installed Cassandra will use the same config/data locations
for 1.2 and 2 so you can't (without work) use brew to manage multiple versions of Cassandra on your Mac - but if you
want that you probably should use VMs instead.
Cassandra is installed: Where is everything?
All of this applies regardless of whether you're on Cassandra 1.2 or Cassandra 2.0. Package managers are great but
sometimes they leave you baffled to where they put everything!
Where's my Cassandra yaml and other property files? /usr/local/etc/cassandra
Where's my logs? /usr/local/var/log/cassandra/
- This can be updated by modifying /usr/local/etc/cassandra/log4j-server.properties
Where's the data/commit log etc (you may need to delete this when playing with different versions /
partitioners) ? /usr/local/var/lib/cassandra/data
How do I stop and start Cassandra?
If you're used to unix services/init.d etc you'll want to know how to start/stop Cassandra without the kill
command. On Mac this is launchd using the launchctl utility. Assuming you installed Cassandra using homebrew use the
following commands:
launchctl start homebrew.mxcl.cassandra
launchctl stop homebrew.mxcl.cassandra
That's a lot of typing so I tend to alias these in my profile e.g
alias stop_cassandra="launchctl stop homebrew.mxcl.cassandra"
alias start_cassandra="launchctl start homebrew.mxcl.cassandra"