A little note on how I setup and bootstrap a local Cassandra clusters on macOS machines for development.

Instructions below were tested on macOS Sierra, and aim to spawn a 3-nodes 2.1.x cluster.

Install ccm and its dependencies: 

1$ brew install ant
2$ brew cask install java
3$ pip install --upgrade ccm

Just in case we messed up a previous installation, let’s clean things up: 

1$ ccm switch test21
2$ ccm stop test21
3$ killall java
4$ ccm remove
5$ rm -rf "${HOME}/.ccm/test21"

Create a new 3-nodes cluster named test21 with the latest Cassandra release of the 2.1.x series: 

1$ ccm create test21 -v 2.1 -n 3

Here is an example on how we can alter the common configuration of all nodes of the cluster. In this case to bump all timeouts ten times: 

1$ tee -a ~/.ccm/test21/cluster.conf <<-EOF
2config_options: {
3    read_request_timeout_in_ms: 50000,
4    range_request_timeout_in_ms: 100000,
5    write_request_timeout_in_ms: 20000,
6    request_timeout_in_ms: 100000,
7    tombstone_failure_threshold: 10000000}
8EOF
9$ ccm updateconf

Also had to sometimes increase Java’s heap size, like to accommodate large data imports: 

1$ export CCM_MAX_HEAP_SIZE="12G"
2$ export CCM_HEAP_NEWSIZE="2400M"

Before starting the server, we need to create missing local network interfaces, one for each node: 

1$ sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.1 up
2$ sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.2 up
3$ sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.3 up

We can now start the cluster: 

1$ ccm start test21

To get the state of the cluster: 

1$ ccm status
2Cluster: 'test21'
3-----------------
4node1: UP
5node3: UP
6node2: UP

Or a much more detailed status: 

 1$ ccm status -v
 2Cluster: 'test21'
 3-----------------
 4node1: UP
 5       auto_bootstrap=False
 6       thrift=('127.0.0.1', 9160)
 7       binary=('127.0.0.1', 9042)
 8       storage=('127.0.0.1', 7000)
 9       jmx_port=7100
10       remote_debug_port=0
11       byteman_port=0
12       initial_token=-9223372036854775808
13       pid=81379
14
15node3: UP
16       auto_bootstrap=False
17       thrift=('127.0.0.3', 9160)
18       binary=('127.0.0.3', 9042)
19       storage=('127.0.0.3', 7000)
20       jmx_port=7300
21       remote_debug_port=0
22       byteman_port=0
23       initial_token=3074457345618258602
24       pid=81381
25
26node2: UP
27       auto_bootstrap=False
28       thrift=('127.0.0.2', 9160)
29       binary=('127.0.0.2', 9042)
30       storage=('127.0.0.2', 7000)
31       jmx_port=7200
32       remote_debug_port=0
33       byteman_port=0
34       initial_token=-3074457345618258603
35       pid=81380

To get the detailed data ownership status, you need to get through a node and point to an existing column family: 

 1$ ccm node1 status my_column_family
 2
 3Datacenter: datacenter1
 4=======================
 5Status=Up/Down
 6|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
 7--  Address    Load     Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack
 8UN  127.0.0.1  6.08 GB  1       100.0%            25e0440b-3ac9-490e-b0b0-260e96395f15  rack1
 9UN  127.0.0.2  6.22 GB  1       100.0%            848edc79-db1c-49bf-bdd8-3768b588460f  rack1
10UN  127.0.0.3  6.14 GB  1       100.0%            75acd6c7-61c5-4ae7-9008-63d6426d1468  rack1

For debugging, a node’s log is available through ccm : 

1$ ccm node1 showlog

And you can directly query through that node: 

1$ TZ=UTC cqlsh --cqlversion=3.2.1 127.0.0.1
2Connected to test21 at 127.0.0.1:9042.
3[cqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 2.1.12 | CQL spec 3.2.1 | Native protocol v3]
4Use HELP for help.
5cqlsh> CONSISTENCY QUORUM;
6Consistency level set to QUORUM.
7cqlsh>

Finally, to restore a bunch of table snapshots from your production cluster: 

1$ TABLES="table1 table2 table3"
2$ DUMP_FOLDER="${HOME}/dump/2016-09-12/"
3$ for host_folder in $(ls "${DUMP_FOLDER}"); do
4>     for table in ${TABLES}; do
5>         SSTABLE_FOLDER="${DUMP_FOLDER}/${host_folder}/my_column_family/${table}";
6>         echo "Importing: ${SSTABLE_FOLDER} ...";
7>         ccm bulkload "${SSTABLE_FOLDER}";
8>     done
9> done

Forcing a repair on each table after a massive import can’t be bad: 

1$ for table in ${TABLES}; do
2>     ccm node1 nodetool repair my_column_family ${table};
3> done