I’ve continued to make improvements to my “Cassandra on Vagrant” project (Using Vagrant for Local Cassandra Development) which shows how to install open-source Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise in a variety of different ways. Using Vagrant is very helpful for local development and testing. Virtual images can be created very quickly and can be erased when done, keeping your primary development system clean.
Recently I added an example which uses the DataStax Enterprise (DSE) standalone installer which first appeared in DSE 4.5. The standalone installer normally runs in a graphical UI mode, but can also be run in an unattended mode which I’m using here.
To play with the examples, grab a copy of the Vagrant projects from GitHub: bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra. Once you have Vagrant and VirtualBox set up, check out example 5. DSE Installer and go through the setup.
On my Mac laptop, creating a 3-node DSE cluster takes less than 5 minutes. (The speed is greatly improved because we only need to download the installer once.) The installer has several options for running in unattended mode, so the installation can be customized as needed.
See the code and more details at bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra.