Running a Cassandra cluster with only one machine

I've noticed that if you want to run a cassandra cluster on your own pc, for the purpose of small tests, there is no guide in the wiki to do just that.

Therefore, here is how I've done it.

First of you'll need to create an alias for you network interface:

Mac OS
ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.0.2

Linux
ifconfig eth0:0 192.168.0.2

Here I've chosen the en0 (or eth0) interface, but you can choose the one you like, and also the IP address you like.

The first file you'll have to edit is the conf/cassandra.yaml:

- Change the commit_log, data and saved_caches directories, so it doesn't conflict with the ones from the previous "node";
- Change the rpc_port (used for Thrift or Avro) to one that is free;
- Change the listen_address to the IP of your "fake" interface.

Next open the conf/cassandra-env.sh file and change the JMX_PORT.

The last file to edit is the bin/cassandra.in.sh where you'll need to change all the occurences of $CASSANDRA_HOME to the path of the "node". For example, if you're bin directory is in /XXX/YYY/node2/bin, the path is /XXX/YYY/node2.

You can do this to create as many nodes as you want, and then just run them as usual, with bin/cassandra -f