Preparing Standalone Cassandra on Local Machine

Installation

1. Download Cassandra from http://cassandra.apache.org/download/

2. Untar the package, put it in /opt/bin and setup other directories:

tar -zxvf apache-cassandra-1.2.1-bin.tar.gz  
sudo mv apache-cassandra-1.2.1 /opt/cassandra  
sudo mkdir -p /var/log/cassandra  
sudo chown -R _USER_NAME_ /var/log/cassandra  
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/cassandra  
sudo chown -R _USER_NAME_ /var/lib/cassandra  

3. Add Cassandra binaries to path by adding the following line to ~/.profile
   export PATH=$PATH:/opt/cassandra/bin

4. Run the following line to add the binaries to path without logging in again
   source ~/.profile

5. Try to run it with:
   `cassandra -f\´

If it does not work, try installing JDK version 7:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless openjdk-7-jre-lib
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Pick the newest java available and try again:
cassandra -f

Making it run automatically on startup (tested on Ubuntu)

Create the file /etc/init.d/cassandra with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 2345 80 45 
# description: Starts and stops Cassandra 
# update deamon path to point to the cassandra executable 

CASS_BIN=/opt/cassandra/bin/cassandra 
CASS_PID=/var/run/cassandra.pid 

start() { 
    if [ -f $CASS_PID ] && checkpid `cat $CASS_PID`; then 
        echo "Cassandra is already running." 
        exit 0 
    fi 

    echo -n "Starting Cassandra... " 
    $CASS_BIN -p $CASS_PID 
    echo "OK" 
    return 0 
}

stop() { 
    if [ ! -f $CASS_PID ]; then
        echo "Cassandra is already stopped."
        exit 0
    fi

    echo -n "Stopping Cassandra... " 
    kill $(cat $CASS_PID) 
    echo "OK" 
    return 0 
}

status_fn() { 
    if [ -f $CASS_PID ]; then 
        echo "Cassandra is running." 
        exit 0 
    else 
        echo "Cassandra is stopped." 
        exit 1 
    fi
}

case "$1" in 
    start) 
        start 
        ;; 
    stop) 
        stop 
        ;; 
    status) 
        status_fn 
        ;; 
    restart) 
        stop 
        start 
        ;; 
    *) 
        echo $"Usage: $prog {start|stop|restart|status}" 
        exit 1 
esac 

exit $?

Besides that, run the following line to make this file executable:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/cassandra

For Ubuntu, make this to add cassandra to the initialization process:
sudo update-rc.d cassandra defaults

For other distributions:

chkconfig --add cassandra
chkconfig cassandra on

That's, restart your machine and test it!

Enable native transport protocol

The native transport protocol is how the ruby driver accesses Cassandra. To configure it, open /opt/cassandra/conf/cassandra.yaml and look for native_transport_protocol and set it to true

Restart Cassandra with:
/etc/init.d/cassandra restart

You're all set to play with Cassandra in development environment!