Following my successful Cassandra Cluster setup and having a potential client example to work with running Ruby On Rails (RoR), I came across the following examples in Ruby.

• up and running with cassandra
• Twissandra

Not being a ruby developer, I thought it was time to investigate further. Starting first on Mac OS X 10.5, I found the first line example of installing cassandra via gem unsuccessful.

$ gem install cassandra
Updating metadata for 1 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
.
complete
ERROR:  could not find cassandra locally or in a repository

Some more reading highlights Otherwise, you need to install Java 1.6, Git 1.6, Ruby, and Rubygems in some reasonable way.

In case you didn’t read my earlier posts, Java 6 is installed, but not the default.

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

I achieved installing RubyGems via Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X.

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update

Updating metadata for 1 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
.
complete
Successfully installed rubygems-update-1.3.6
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rubygems-update-1.3.6...
Installing RDoc documentation for rubygems-update-1.3.6...
Could not find main page README
Could not find main page README
Could not find main page README
Could not find main page README

$ sudo update_rubygems
RubyGems 1.3.6 installed

=== 1.3.6 / 2010-02-17

NOTE:

http://rubygems.org is now the default source for downloading gems.

You may have sources set via ~/.gemrc, so you should replace
http://gems.rubyforge.org with http://rubygems.org

http://gems.rubyforge.org will continue to work for the forseeable future.

New features:

* `gem` commands
  * Added `gem push` and `gem owner` for interacting with modern/Gemcutter
    sources
  * `gem dep` now supports --prerelease.
  * `gem fetch` now supports --prerelease.
  * `gem server` now supports --bind.  Patch #27357 by Bruno Michel.
  * `gem rdoc` no longer overwrites built documentation.  Use --overwrite
    force rebuilding.  Patch #25982 by Akinori MUSHA.
* Captial letters are now allowed in prerelease versions.

Bug fixes:

* Development deps are no longer added to rubygems-update gem so older
  versions can update sucessfully.
* Installer bugs:
  * Prerelease gems can now depend on non-prerelease gems.
  * Development dependencies are ignored unless explicitly needed.  Bug #27608
    by Roger Pack.
* `gem` commands
  * `gem which` now fails if no paths were found.  Adapted patch #27681 by
    Caio Chassot.
  * `gem server` no longer has invalid markup.  Bug #27045 by Eric Young.
  * `gem list` and friends show both prerelease and regular gems when
    --prerelease --all is given
* Gem::Format no longer crashes on empty files.  Bug #27292 by Ian Ragsdale.
* Gem::GemPathSearcher handles nil require_paths. Patch #27334 by Roger Pack.
* Gem::RemoteFetcher no longer copies the file if it is where we want it.
  Patch #27409 by Jakub Šťastný.

Deprecation Notices:

* lib/rubygems/timer.rb has been removed.
* Gem::Dependency#version_requirements is deprecated and will be removed on or
  after August 2010.
* Bulk index update is no longer supported.
* Gem::manage_gems was removed in 1.3.3.
* Time::today was removed in 1.3.3.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RubyGems installed the following executables:
	/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/gem

NOTE: This second command took over 60 seconds with no user feedback.

I was then able to successfully install cassandra via ruby’s gem package manager.

$ sudo gem install cassandra
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed thrift-0.2.0
Successfully installed thrift_client-0.4.0
Successfully installed simple_uuid-0.1.0
Successfully installed cassandra-0.7.5
4 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for thrift-0.2.0...

Enclosing class/module 'thrift_module' for class BinaryProtocolAccelerated not known

Enclosing class/module 'thrift_module' for class BinaryProtocolAccelerated not known
Installing ri documentation for thrift_client-0.4.0...
Installing ri documentation for simple_uuid-0.1.0...
Installing ri documentation for cassandra-0.7.5...
Installing RDoc documentation for thrift-0.2.0...

Enclosing class/module 'thrift_module' for class BinaryProtocolAccelerated not known

Enclosing class/module 'thrift_module' for class BinaryProtocolAccelerated not known
Installing RDoc documentation for thrift_client-0.4.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for simple_uuid-0.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for cassandra-0.7.5...

My use of cassandra_helper provided the following expected dependency error.

$ cassandra_helper cassandra
Set the CASSANDRA_INCLUDE environment variable to use a non-default cassandra.in.sh and friends.
(in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/cassandra-0.7.5)
You need to install git 1.6 or 1.7

I found instructions to install git at Installing git (OSX) and installed via GUI installer.

I had to include to my current session path to get my Ruby Cassandra installation.

$ export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH

$ cassandra_helper cassandra
Set the CASSANDRA_INCLUDE environment variable to use a non-default cassandra.in.sh and friends.
(in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/cassandra-0.7.5)
Checking Cassandra out from git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 16715, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2707/2707), done.
remote: Total 16715 (delta 9946), reused 16011 (delta 9364)
Receiving objects: 100% (16715/16715), 19.22 MiB | 1.15 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (9946/9946), done.
Updating Cassandra.
Buildfile: build.xml

clean:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds
HEAD is now at 298a0e6 check-in debian packaging
Building Cassandra
Buildfile: build.xml

build-subprojects:

init:
    [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/build/classes
    [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/build/test/classes
    [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/src/gen-java

check-gen-cli-grammar:

gen-cli-grammar:
     [echo] Building Grammar /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/cli/Cli.g  ....

build-project:
     [echo] apache-cassandra-incubating: /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/build.xml
    [javac] Compiling 247 source files to /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server/build/classes
    [javac] Note: Some input files use or override a deprecated API.
    [javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.
    [javac] Note: Some input files use unchecked or unsafe operations.
    [javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

build:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 42 seconds
CASSANDRA_HOME: /Users/rbradfor/cassandra/server
CASSANDRA_CONF: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/cassandra-0.7.5/conf
Listening for transport dt_socket at address: 8888
DEBUG - Loading settings from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/cassandra-0.7.5/conf/storage-conf.xml
....

I was then able to complete the example at up and running with cassandra running via the ruby interactive console.

I was also able to fire up the cassandra-cli and see the data added in ruby.

$ bin/cassandra-cli -host localhost
Connected to localhost/9160
cassandra> get Twitter.Statuses['1']
=> (column=user_id, value=5, timestamp=1267072406503471)
=> (column=text, value=Nom nom nom nom nom., timestamp=1267072406503471)
Returned 2 results.
cassandra> get Twitter.UserRelationships['5'];
=> (super_column=user_timeline,
     (column=???!??zvZ+?!, value=1, timestamp=1267072426991872)
     (column=??-?!???C?th?, value=2, timestamp=1267072427019091))
Returned 1 results.

No sure about the data in the second example.