cqlsh connection error: 'ref() does not take keyword arguments'

You are running into CASSANDRA-11850, where cqlsh breaks with Python 2.7.11+. This ticket has been marked as "Resolved" and a patch has been applied to Cassandra 3.9 which has not been released yet.

I believe I installed all the necessary packages such as java 8 and python 2.7.12.

In the interim (until 3.9 is released) you can roll back to Python 2.7.10, and cqlsh should work (not trivial). Otherwise, DataStax DevCenter should work with Cassandra 3.7.

Edit 20161020

Cassandra 3.9 was released a few weeks ago, and can now be downloaded.

refer https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-11850

After setting environment variable

CQLSH_NO_BUNDLED=TRUE

it resolved.

I use windows 7, python 2.7.12, cassandra 3.7

Need to add following command

sudo apt install python-pip
pip install cassandra-driver
export CQLSH_NO_BUNDLED=true

This works for Ubuntu 16.04 in Amazon EC2:

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install python-cassandra python3-cassandra
CQLSH_NO_BUNDLED=TRUE cqlsh "$(ec2metadata --local-ipv4)"