I needed to setup a quick Cassandra environment in Windows today, but I ran into a problem when executing the quick start guide from Cassandra's (excellent) website . The quick start assumes a working Docker environment. Because this is in Windows, WSL 2 has been configured, and the Docker for Windows binary has been properly installed: docker pull cassandra:latest docker network create cassandra docker run --rm -d --name cassandra --hostname cassandra --network cassandra cassandra From here you can either load data into Cassandra from a file or start a prompt. A prompt is supposed to be opened like this per the documentation: docker run --rm -it --network cassandra nuvo/docker-cqlsh cqlsh cassandra 9042 --cqlversion='3.4.4' This produces an error: Error messages like this can be a little intimidating. There's a hint, though, in the last line. ValueError and 'invalid literal for int()