The Cassandra PV Archiver server is provided in two forms of distribution: The first one is a binary archive that can be used on Windows and most Unix-like platforms. The second one comes in the form of a Debian package. This Debian package has been designed to work on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Most likely it is also going to work on most other modern, Debian-based distributions, as long as they use Upstart or systemd. The Debian package does not provide a traditional System-V style init script, so it will not work on distributions using this kind of init system.

When installing the Debian package, the package scripts take care of creating a user and group with the names cassandra-pv-archiver and registering the server with the init system. This means that after installing the package, the cassandra-pv-archiver-server job is automatically started with the privileges of that user.

When using the binary distribution, users have to take care of manually creating a user and group for running the server and also have to register the server with their init system. It is possible to run the the server as an existing user or even as the root user, but for a production setup, using a separate user is strongly encouraged for security reasons.

When using the binary distribution (and not the Debian package), the start script for running the archive server is located in the bin directory and is called cassandra-pv-archiver-server (cassandra-pv-archiver-server.bat on Windows). The server runs in the foreground, so the terminal that is running the server has to be kept alive.

When installing the Cassandra PV Archiver for the first time, the keyspace used for storing data has to be created in the Cassandra cluster. The default name for the keyspace is pv_archive. You can choose a different name, but in this case the name has to be explicitly specified in the configuration file of the Cassandra PV Archiver server.

In order to create the pv_archive keyspace in a single node cluster, you can run the following command in the CQL shell (cqlsh):

CREATE KEYSPACE pv_archive
  WITH replication = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': '1'};

When using a multi-node cluster, you typically do not want to use the SimpleStrategy for replication and the replication factor should be at least three. Please refer to the Cassandra documentation provided by DataStax for details.

Note

When enabling authentication for the Cassandra cluster, ensure that the user used for the Cassandra PV Archiver server has full write access to its keyspace. In particular, it has to be able to create tables and query and modify data. For this purpose, the user at least needs the CREATE permission on the keyspace and the MODIFY and SELECT permissions for all tables in the keyspace. In order to be ready for potential modifications made by future versions of the Cassandra PV Archiver server, it is suggested to grant all the necessary permissions on the keyspace instead of the table level and to also grant the ALTER and DROP permissions on the keyspace.

When using a local, single-node Cassandra setup with the default keyspace name and not requiring authentication, the default configuration should be fine for getting started. Otherwise, please refer to Section 3, “Server configuration”.

Once the server has been started, its administrative web-interface is available on port 4812 (unless the port number has been changed in the configuration file). Please refer to Section 4, “Administrative user interface” to learn more about using the administrative interface.