You'll need to set up your environment so that Cassandra knows where to find the latest version of Java. To do this, set up your JAVA_HOME environment variable to the install location, and your PATH to include the executable in your new Java installation, as follows:
$ export JAVA_HOME=" /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_65.jdk/Contents/Home"
$ export PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin":$PATH
You should put these two lines at the bottom of your .bashrc or .bash_profile file to ensure that things still work when you open a new terminal.
The installation instructions given earlier assume that you're using the latest version of Mac OS X (at the time of writing this, 10.11.6 El Capitan). If you're running a different version of OS X, installing Java might require different steps. Check out https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_mac.xml for detailed installation information.
Once you've got the right version of Java, you're ready to install Cassandra. It's very easy to install Cassandra using Homebrew; simply type the following:
$ brew install cassandra
$ pip install cassandra-driver cql
$ cassandra
Here's what we just did:
- Installed Cassandra using the Homebrew package manager
- Installed the CQL shell and its dependency, the Python Cassandra driver
- Started the Cassandra server