Rich Atkinson

(Updated: 2nd November for Cassandra 0.4.1)

I couldn’t find much in the way of an OS X install guide for Cassandra and (particularly) Thrift, so here’s a brief summary of the steps I took to get Cassandra up and running on Snow Leopard.

Requirements: xcode (provides java, ant and g++, autotools etc for compiling thrift) & svn.

I used macports to get “boost, “pkgconfig” and “libevent”, all used by for Thrift.

Part 1: JAVA_HOME

OSX does not set JAVA_HOME for you, instead it must be done manually.

A simple way is to add the following line to ~/.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

After setting JAVA_HOME, you will need to exit and reopen terminal before the change will take effect.

Part 2: Installing Cassandra

# I installed Cassandra into /opt and run it as me.
mkdir -p /opt/cassandra
chown -R {you} /opt/cassandra

# Need to create the log directory
mkdir -p /var/log/cassandra
chown -R {you} /var/log/cassandra

# Also Cassandra created a directory instead of a file for system.log, so...
touch /var/log/cassandra/system.log

# By default Cassandra 0.4.1 uses /var/lib for data, so...
mkdir -p /var/lib/cassandra
chown -R {you} /var/lib/cassandra

# now lets get the source
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0.4.1 /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1

# If all is well you should be able to build.
cd /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1
ant

# If that works, you should be able to run cassandra
bin/cassandra -f

All going well, you should be able to, in a new terminal tab, run through the CLI tests here.

Part 3: Installing Thrift

First you’ll need boost, pkgconfig and libevent. So (using macports):

sudo port install boost
sudo port install libevent
sudo port install pkgconfig

Now, with a lack of tags and branches in SVN, I just grabbed trunk (please could someone let me know if this unwise).

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/thrift/trunk/ /opt/cassandra/thrift

SVN revision at time of writing was 817923

Next, we build it…

(Note the /opt/local references, that’s where macports puts it’s stuff by default)

cd /opt/cassandra/thrift
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --with-boost=/opt/local --with-libevent=/opt/local --prefix=/opt/local

# If you get the error:
# ./configure: line 16440: syntax error near unexpected token `MONO,'
# ./configure: line 16440: ` PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MONO, mono >= 2.0.0, net_3_5=yes, net_3_5=no)'

# It's documented, to fix it: (assuming you installed pkgtools from macports)
ln -s /opt/local/share/aclocal/pkg.m4 /opt/cassandra/thrift/aclocal/pkg.m4

# once again:
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --with-boost=/opt/local --with-libevent=/opt/local --prefix=/opt/local
sudo make install


Language bindings

The make install should have installed libraries for ruby, perl, python etc.

EDIT: Python bindings were installed into /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages. I had to move them to my (default apple provided python 2.6) site-packages.

If you want to install them into a virtualenv you will find the setup.py in /opt/cassandra/thrift/lib/py

Part 4: Generate “cassandra” from thrift.

Navigate to /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1/interface

and then…
thrift --gen py:new_style cassandra.thrift

This generates the cassandra python package which you can copy to your project.

If you have any suggestions for improvement here, please let me know.