Running pyspark after pip install pyspark

Question

I wanted to install pyspark on my home machine. I did

pip install pyspark
pip install jupyter

Both seemed to work well.

But when I try to run pyspark I get

pyspark
Could not find valid SPARK_HOME while searching ['/home/user', '/home/user/.local/bin']

What should SPARK_HOME be set to?

Answer 1

Pyspark from PyPi (i.e. installed with pip) does not contain the full Pyspark functionality; it is only intended for use with a Spark installation in an already existing cluster [EDIT: or in local mode only - see accepted answer]. From the docs:

The Python packaging for Spark is not intended to replace all of the other use cases. This Python packaged version of Spark is suitable for interacting with an existing cluster (be it Spark standalone, YARN, or Mesos) - but does not contain the tools required to setup your own standalone Spark cluster. You can download the full version of Spark from the Apache Spark downloads page.

NOTE: If you are using this with a Spark standalone cluster you must ensure that the version (including minor version) matches or you may experience odd errors

You should download a full Spark distribution as described here.

Answer 2

I just faced the same issue, but it turned out that pip install pyspark downloads spark distirbution that works well in local mode. Pip just doesn't set appropriate SPARK_HOME. But when I set this manually, pyspark works like a charm (without downloading any additional packages).

$ pip3 install --user pyspark
Collecting pyspark
  Downloading pyspark-2.3.0.tar.gz (211.9MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 211.9MB 9.4kB/s 
Collecting py4j==0.10.6 (from pyspark)
  Downloading py4j-0.10.6-py2.py3-none-any.whl (189kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 194kB 3.9MB/s 
Building wheels for collected packages: pyspark
  Running setup.py bdist_wheel for pyspark ... done
  Stored in directory: /home/mario/.cache/pip/wheels/4f/39/ba/b4cb0280c568ed31b63dcfa0c6275f2ffe225eeff95ba198d6
Successfully built pyspark
Installing collected packages: py4j, pyspark
Successfully installed py4j-0.10.6 pyspark-2.3.0

$ PYSPARK_PYTHON=python3 SPARK_HOME=~/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pyspark pyspark
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 23 2017, 16:37:01) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
2018-03-31 14:02:39 WARN  NativeCodeLoader:62 - Unable to load native-hadoop library for your platform... using builtin-java classes where applicable
Setting default log level to "WARN".
To adjust logging level use sc.setLogLevel(newLevel). For SparkR, use setLogLevel(newLevel).
Welcome to
      ____              __
     / __/__  ___ _____/ /__
    _\ \/ _ \/ _ `/ __/  '_/
   /__ / .__/\_,_/_/ /_/\_\   version 2.3.0
      /_/

Using Python version 3.5.2 (default, Nov 23 2017 16:37:01)
>>>

Hope that helps :-)