Homebrew is a great little package manager for OS X. If you haven't already, installing it is pretty easy:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

Mac OS X has a copy of Python preinstalled, but this makes sure you get the newest version.

brew install python

To use cqlsh, the Cassandra query language shell, you need to install cql:

pip install cql

This installs Apache Cassandra:

brew install cassandra

Use this command to start Cassandra:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist

Use this command to stop Cassandra:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist

On Mavericks, Homebrew failed to move the plist file into LaunchAgents, which gives this error message:

launchctl: Couldn't stat("/Users/MNCH/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist"): No such file or directory

To fix this just issue the following command. Then, try using the launchctl load command again:

cp /usr/local/Cellar/cassandra/homebrew.mxcl.cassandra.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

Properties: /usr/local/etc/cassandra Logs: /usr/local/var/log/cassandra Data: /usr/local/var/lib/cassandra/data

Have fun with Cassandra!