Update 2014-11-07 I've revamped cassandra-docker with a new entrypoint. It is available on Github as tobert/cassandra:2.1.1 and tobert/cassandra:2.0.11. The instructions are fairly similar but the syntax and paths have changed. The README.md has further details. TL;DR: use volumes for /var/lib/cassandra As a fan of Linux containers and evangelist for Apache Cassandra, I get a lot of questions abou