Cassandra Server

Cassandra releases include the core server, the nodetool administration command-line interface, and a development shell (cqlsh and the old cassandra-cli).

The latest stable release of Apache Cassandra is 1.2.4 (released on 2013-04-11). If you're just starting out, download this one.

Apache provides binary tarballs and Debian packages:

Third Party Distributions

  • DataStax Community is available in Linux rpm, deb, and tar packages, a Windows MSI installer, and a Mac OS X binary.

CQL Drivers

Starting with version 0.8, Cassandra supports CQL (Cassandra Query Language), an SQL-alike alternative to the traditional RPC interface. Drivers are available for a variety of languages and can be downloaded from their respective Apache Extras hosted pages.

The next major version of the Cassandra Query Language, CQL3, is scheduled for release in Cassandra 1.2, but an evaluation version of CQL3 is optionally available in Cassandra 1.1 (use cqlsh -3 to access it).

New users to Cassandra should be sure to check out the Getting Started guide.

Previous and Archived Cassandra Server Releases

Previous stable branches of Cassandra continue to see periodic maintenance for some time after a new major release is made. The lastest release on the 1.1 branch is 1.1.11 (released on 2013-04-19).

The lastest release on the 1.0 branch is 1.0.12 (released on 2012-10-04).

Older (unsupported) versions of Cassandra are archived here.

Source

The Cassandra source code is available to download:

Development is done in the Apache Git repository. To check out a copy:

git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra.git

Bleeding edge development snapshots of Cassandra are available from Jenkins continuous integration.

Potential contributors should look over the wiki, in particular HowToContribute.