Built and maintained by AxonOps

AxonOps Cassandra Development Cluster

This Docker Compose file will create a Cassandra cluster containing 3 nodes along with AxonOps for cluster monitoring and management. The stack uses AxonOps-built containers throughout, including axondb-search (OpenSearch 3.3.2) as the search backend.

One-click deploy to AWS

You can deploy this AxonOps development environment to AWS by using the following link. Otherwise, follow the instructions below for a manual installation.

Important

AWS deployment will incur a cost. This project currently works on x86 architecture only. Apple Silicon / ARM are currently not supported.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

This environment requires a recent version of Docker (Docker Engine 19.03.0 or later) with Docker Compose V2. If you do not have Docker installed the easiest way to get started is to install Docker Desktop which you can find at docker.com.

Please note this environment only supports amd64 architecture. ARM CPUs (e.g. Apple M1/M2) are not currently supported.

If you already have Docker installed then check your versions using these commands:

docker version
docker compose version

On Linux you may need to install the docker-compose-plugin package in order for Docker Compose to work.

Start up

1. Download docker-compose.yml from this repository, or use this command to download it from the command-line:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/axonops/axonops-cassandra-dev-cluster/main/docker-compose.yml

2. Run docker compose up -d from the directory containing docker-compose.yml
3. After a few minutes the containers will start up and initialise the Cassandra cluster
4. After startup is complete open http://127.0.0.1:3000/ in your browser to see the AxonOps dashboard

Accessing Cassandra

Once the cluster has started up you can use this command to run cqlsh inside one of the Cassandra containers:

docker compose exec -it cassandra-0 cqlsh

The CQL port for each node is also exposed on the host's loopback IP address as follows:

cassandra-0: 127.0.0.1:9042
cassandra-1: 127.0.0.1:9043
cassandra-2: 127.0.0.1:9044

Client applications running on the host should be able to use these addresses to connect to Cassandra.

Shutting Down

You can stop the cluster with this command:

docker compose down

This will preserve the data for Cassandra and AxonOps in Docker volumes so it will be available when the cluster is started up again.

Use this command to start the cluster back up:

docker compose up -d

To shut down the cluster and remove all data use this command:

docker compose down -v

This will stop and remove all running containers and delete the Docker volumes containing the Cassandra and AxonOps data.

Keeping up-to-date

Use this command to download the latest versions of the container images used by this project:

docker compose pull

Running different Cassandra versions

This Docker Compose environment supports Cassandra 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0. The default version is 5.0 but you can run 4.0 or 4.1 by setting the CASSANDRA_VERSION environment variable before starting up the containers.

For example to start the cluster with Cassandra 4.0:

CASSANDRA_VERSION=4.0 docker compose up -d

Alternatively to avoid specifying the Cassandra version on the command-line every time you can place the CASSANDRA_VERSION variable in a file named .env in the same directory as docker-compose.yml. For example:

echo 'CASSANDRA_VERSION=4.0' >.env
docker compose up -d

The supported values for CASSANDRA_VERSION are 5.0, 4.1 or 4.0.

Search backend (axondb-search / OpenSearch)

The axondb-search service uses the AxonOps-built OpenSearch image (ghcr.io/axonops/axondb-search). TLS and the OpenSearch security plugin are enabled by default. The service ships with a hardcoded default admin account:

Setting	Value
Username	admin
Password	MyS3cur3P@ss2025
Endpoint	https://axondb-search:9200 (in-network)
TLS	Self-signed, generated on first start

axon-server is wired to the backend via environment variables only (SEARCH_DB_HOSTS, SEARCH_DB_USERNAME, SEARCH_DB_PASSWORD, SEARCH_DB_SKIP_VERIFY=true). No config file is mounted.

To rotate the admin credentials, set AXONOPS_SEARCH_USER and AXONOPS_SEARCH_PASSWORD on the axondb-search service and mirror the same values into SEARCH_DB_USERNAME / SEARCH_DB_PASSWORD on axon-server.

About AxonOps

AxonOps is the operational platform for Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka. AxonOps provides monitoring, alerting, backup, repair, and configuration management for distributed data infrastructure at scale, helping teams run their clusters with confidence in production.

This project is maintained by AxonOps. For support, visit axonops.com/contact.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — see the LICENSE file for details.