How to get pycassaShell working in windows?

Question

EDIT: I got it working, I went into the pycassa directory and typed python pycassaShell but the 2nd part of my question (at the bottom there) is still valid: how do I run a script in pycassaShell?

I recently installed Cassandra and pycassa and followed the instruction from here.

They work fine, except I cant get pycassaShell to load. When I type pycassaShell at the command prompt, I get

'pycassaShell' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
operable program or batch file.

Do I need to set up a path for it?

Also, does anyone know if you can run ddl scripts using pycassaShell? It is for this reason that I want to try it out. At the moment, I'm doing all my ddl in the cassandra CLI, I'd like to be able to put it in a script to automate it.

Answer 1

You probably don't want to be running scripts with pycassaShell. It's designed more as an interactive environment to quickly try things out. For serious scripts, I recommend just writing a normal python script that imports pycassa and sets up the connection pool and column families itself; it should only be an extra 5 or so lines.

However, there is an (undocumented, I just noticed) optional -f or --file flag that you can use. It will essentially run execfile() on that script after startup completes, so you can use the SYSTEM_MANAGER and CF variables that are already set up in your script. This is intended primarily to be used as a prep script for your environment, similar to how you might use a .bashrc file (I don't know of a Windows equivalent).

Regarding DDL statements, I suggest you look at the SystemManager class.