.NET Information center: Run Cassandra As A Windows Service

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Run Cassandra As A Windows Service

One of the main issues that comes up over and over again for Cassandra is:

How do I run Cassandra as a Windows Service?

In this post I am going to answer that question and in the process demonstrate how to do it in less than 10 minutes.

Background

Cassandra is mainly developed by Linux developers so very little attention has been paid to the Windows developer or administrator as far as Cassandra goes. So as Windows developers we have to hop through a couple more hoops than just clicking on an install.exe file and and letting it do all the work. However lucky for us, those hoops are easy and quickly hopped through.

Step 1

If you haven’t done so already please read my jump start for Windows users on install Cassandra, this guide will get you ready for the next steps.

Step 2

The second step is also an easy one, you need to download a package called RunAsService, which provides the ability to run any program as a Windows Service.

Download RunAsService.zip

After you have downloaded the file extract the contents to a directory of your choosing. (I extracted it to c:\RunAsService)

Note: RunAsService was originally developed here, however I recompiled it to run on .NET 2.0.

Step 3

To install RunAsService open up a command prompt with Administrative privileges and run this command.

1
cd c:\RunAsService
2
install networkservice
This registers RunAsService with your Windows Service. Make sure to keep your command prompt open because you will need it for the 5th step.

Step 4

To configure RunAsService for Cassandra open up the RunAsService.exe.config file in your favorite text editor and replace <service.settings> section with the following so that it looks like this:

<service.settings>


<service>
<name>Cassandra Database</name>
<executable>C:\apache-cassandra\bin\cassandra.bat</executable>
<parameters></parameters>
</service>
</service.settings>