CqlSh connection issues on Ubuntu 16.04 – Cassandra

I upgraded my Ubuntu 14.04 development system to 16.04 in August with the first point release. I have to say the upgrade process when really smooth. There where small issues with PHP and Python. The only painful issue I had was with Cassandra and CqlSh. The python version which is shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 is 2.7.12 and the version CqlSh is targeted is 2.7.11.

When I tried to connect to CqlSh I got the following error:

There are couple painful, and not so painful ways to downgrade python to the required version, but as I use DataStax’s DevCenter as a visual tool, so I did not bother. Applications built with Cassandra can still run as this is a bug in CqlSh.

Last week I did setup a headless Ubuntu 16.04 as development server for projects which going to use Cassandra among other tools. In this setup developers need to have access to CqlSh, so I had to find a solution for this problem. The least painful way is to install/upgrade the Cassandra python driver trough pip, with the following process:

After this CqlSh should be up and running as normal

• cassandra
• cqlsh
• pete
• python
• ubuntu 16.04