Cassandra in Docker

This repository provides everything you need to run Cassandra in Docker, and is tuned for fast container startup.

The following differences are made from the original Spotify fork:

Cassandra version packaged is 2.0.11.
The CASSANDRA_DC environment was added in the cassandra-base/Dockerfile in order to use PropertyFileSnitch option.

Why?

While naive Cassandra images take around 30 seconds to start, our containers take only a few seconds. Optimizations include:

Disabling vnodes. We don't use them at Spotify, and Cassandra starts much faster without them (~10 sec).
Disabling something called "waiting for gossip to settle down" because there is no gossip in a one-node cluster (another ~10 sec).

spotify/cassandra

This is probably the image you want, it runs a one-node Cassandra cluster. Built from the cassandra directory.
spotify/cassandra:cluster

Runs a Cassandra cluster. Expects CASSANDRA_SEEDS and CASSANDRA_TOKEN env variables to be set. If CASSANDRA_SEEDS is not set, node acts as its own seed. If CASSANDRA_TOKEN is not set, the container will not run. Built from the cassandra-cluster directory.
spotify/cassandra:base

The base image with an unconfigured Cassandra installation. You probably don't want to use this directly. Built from the cassandra-base directory.

Switch to use a PropertyFileSnitch by specifying an environment variable with the DC name in the cassandra-base/Dockerfile.

Currently it is set to:

ENV CASSANDRA_DC Cassandra

Things are still under heavy development:

Only Cassandra 2.0 with almost-generic config (miles away from what we actually run Cassandra with) is supported so far.
There's nothing to help you with tokens and stuff.