Installing Cassandra 3.8 on Debian Jessie

Intro

Cassandra is highly available (no SPOF) distributed database service for managing large amounts of structured data across many commodity servers.

Here is a quick recipe for starting a first Debian based Cassandra server in your Cassandra cluster.

Modify Debian repositories

• Modify default apt sources and make sure you have Contrib in sources:

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free

• Add Cassandra to sources:

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cassandra.list
deb http://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/debian 37x main
deb-src http://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/debian 37x main

Install Oracle Java JDK

Visit Oracle website and download Oracle JDK tar.gz package from Oracle website

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

 Install Java and Cassandra

sudo -i
apt-get update && apt-get install java-package && exit
apt install libgl1-mesa-glx libgtk2.0-0 libxxf86vm1 -y
make-jpkg jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz
dpkg -i oracle-java8-jdk_8u91_amd64.deb
update-alternatives --config java # and choose Oracle version
apt-get install cassandra -y

Is it running?

# systemctl status cassandra
cassandra.service - LSB: distributed storage system for structured data
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/cassandra)
Active: active (running) since Wed 2016-06-22 13:23:54 UTC; 17min ago
CGroup: /system.slice/cassandra.service
└─17055 java -Xloggc:/var/log/cassandra/gc.log -ea -XX:+UseThreadPriorities -XX:ThreadPriorityPolicy=42 -XX:+Heap

Working with Cassandra

cqlsh
nodetool status
nodetool info
nodetool tpstats

Example output:

$ cqlsh

Connected to Test Cluster at 127.0.0.1:9042.
[cqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.7 | CQL spec 3.4.2 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
cqlsh> 

$ nodetool status

Datacenter: datacenter1
=======================
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address    Load       Tokens       Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack
UN  127.0.0.1  105.98 KiB  256          100.0%            c1ad1f98-170a-4a29-a007-46fd1dda4506  rack1

Easy!