Stargate on virtual machine or bare metal

Stargate can be installed alongside an existing Cassandra cluster using a virtual machine or bare metal.

[Optional] Make sure Cassandra is up and running. Stargate requires authentication, so be sure to enable it in the cassandra.yaml file. If you don’t have a cluster running, use these instructions to install Cassandra 3.11.

Next, prepare a virtual machine to install Stargate on. You’ll need to be sure Java 8 is installed.

Once you have a machine ready, download the Stargate zip file. This file will provide the jar files that are required to run Stargate. A typical method is using wget:

wget https://github.com/stargate/stargate/releases/download/v1.0.57/stargate-jars.zip


Unzip the files:

unzip stargate-jars.zip


Make sure that port 7000 is open on the Stargate machine. This port is the default inter-node communication port that Cassandra and Stargate use to pass communications.

Now start Stargate using the starctl command, the main command for starting and configuring Stargate:

./starctl --cluster-name <cluster name> \
 
--cluster-seed <seed node to connect to> \
 
--cluster-version <version> \
 
--listen <ip address for stargate to listen on> \
 
--dc <data center name> \
 
--rack <rack name of node to connect to> \
 
--dse #for DSE only, delete for Cassandra \
 
--enable-auth

For example:

./starctl \
--cluster-name stargate_test_cluster \
--cluster-seed 172.31.29.170 \
--cluster-version 3.11 \
--listen 172.31.29.175 \
--dc DC1 \
--rack RACK1 \
--enable-auth

where

  • stargate_test_cluster is the name of the Cassandra cluster

  • 172.31.29.170 is the IP address of the Cassandra node

  • 172.31.29.175 is the IP address of the Stargate node (Stargate uses this IP address to broadcast itself, to join a Cassandra cluster as a coordinator node)

  • DC1 is the name of the data center of the Cassandra node

  • RACK1 is the name of the data center of the Cassandra node The full set of options are described in the starctl documentation.

If you are unsure of the datacenter and rack, run nodetool status on the Cassandra node you are connected to.

After a few seconds, you should see that Stargate has started. You will see log output in your terminal display. If you get a binding error, then you may have tried to start Stargate incorrectly and the process is still running. Terminate that process and start it again.

That’s it! You are ready to try a Stargate QuickStart.