Setting up the Mahout development environment

In this recipe, we are going to take a look at how to set up the Mahout development environment.

Getting ready

To perform this recipe, you should have a running Hadoop cluster.

How to do it...

Setting up the Mahout environment is very easy:

1. To start with, we first need to download the latest version of Mahout from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/mahout/.

2. I am going to use version 0.11.1 ,which can be found at http://www.eu.apache.org/dist/mahout/0.11.1/apache-mahout-distribution-0.11.1.tar.gz.

3. Next, unzip the tar and rename the folder as Mahout for simplicity's sake:

   sudo tar  -xzf  apache-mahout-distribution-0.11.1.tar.gz
   sudo mv apache-mahout-distribution-0.11.1 mahout
   

4. To use the Mahout commands from everywhere, we add the distribution path to PATH.

   Edit ~/.bashrc and add the following commands to it:

   export MAHOUT_HOME=/usr/local/mahout
   export PATH=$PATH:$MAHOUT_HOME/bin
   

5. Execute the following command to take a look at whether the changes are effective...