bfdd805f15
One of the design goals of the Alternator test suite (test/alternator)
is that developers should be able to run the tests against some already
running installation by running `cd test/alternator; pytest [--url ...]`.
Some of our presentations and documents recommend running Alternator
via docker as:
docker run --name scylla -d -p 8000:8000 scylladb/scylla:latest
--alternator-port=8000 --alternator-write-isolation=always
This only makes port 8000 available to the host - the CQL port is
blocked. We had a bug in conftest.py's get_valid_alternator_role()
which caused it to fail (and fail every single test) when CQL is
not available. What we really want is that when CQL is not available
and we can't figure out a correct secret key to connect to Alternator,
we just try a connect with a fake key - and hope that the option
alternator-enforce-authorization is turned off. In fact, this is what
the code comments claim was already happening - but we failed to
handle the case that CQL is not available at all.
After this patch, one can run Alternator with the above docker
command, and then run tests against it.
By the way, this provides another way for running any old release of
Scylla and running Alternator tests against it. We already supported
a similar feature via test/alternator/run's "--release" option, but
its implementation doesn't use docker.
Fixes #22591
Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@scylladb.com>
Closes scylladb/scylladb#22592
Scylla
What is Scylla?
Scylla is the real-time big data database that is API-compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB. Scylla embraces a shared-nothing approach that increases throughput and storage capacity to realize order-of-magnitude performance improvements and reduce hardware costs.
For more information, please see the ScyllaDB web site.
Build Prerequisites
Scylla is fairly fussy about its build environment, requiring very recent versions of the C++23 compiler and of many libraries to build. The document HACKING.md includes detailed information on building and developing Scylla, but to get Scylla building quickly on (almost) any build machine, Scylla offers a frozen toolchain, This is a pre-configured Docker image which includes recent versions of all the required compilers, libraries and build tools. Using the frozen toolchain allows you to avoid changing anything in your build machine to meet Scylla's requirements - you just need to meet the frozen toolchain's prerequisites (mostly, Docker or Podman being available).
Building Scylla
Building Scylla with the frozen toolchain dbuild is as easy as:
$ git submodule update --init --force --recursive
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./configure.py
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ninja build/release/scylla
For further information, please see:
- Developer documentation for more information on building Scylla.
- Build documentation on how to build Scylla binaries, tests, and packages.
- Docker image build documentation for information on how to build Docker images.
Running Scylla
To start Scylla server, run:
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./build/release/scylla --workdir tmp --smp 1 --developer-mode 1
This will start a Scylla node with one CPU core allocated to it and data files stored in the tmp directory.
The --developer-mode is needed to disable the various checks Scylla performs at startup to ensure the machine is configured for maximum performance (not relevant on development workstations).
Please note that you need to run Scylla with dbuild if you built it with the frozen toolchain.
For more run options, run:
$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild ./build/release/scylla --help
Testing
See test.py manual.
Scylla APIs and compatibility
By default, Scylla is compatible with Apache Cassandra and its API - CQL. There is also support for the API of Amazon DynamoDB™, which needs to be enabled and configured in order to be used. For more information on how to enable the DynamoDB™ API in Scylla, and the current compatibility of this feature as well as Scylla-specific extensions, see Alternator and Getting started with Alternator.
Documentation
Documentation can be found here. Seastar documentation can be found here. User documentation can be found here.
Training
Training material and online courses can be found at Scylla University. The courses are free, self-paced and include hands-on examples. They cover a variety of topics including Scylla data modeling, administration, architecture, basic NoSQL concepts, using drivers for application development, Scylla setup, failover, compactions, multi-datacenters and how Scylla integrates with third-party applications.
Contributing to Scylla
If you want to report a bug or submit a pull request or a patch, please read the contribution guidelines.
If you are a developer working on Scylla, please read the developer guidelines.
Contact
- The community forum and Slack channel are for users to discuss configuration, management, and operations of ScyllaDB.
- The developers mailing list is for developers and people interested in following the development of ScyllaDB to discuss technical topics.