In this section, we set up a Spark development environment in standalone deploy mode. To get started with Spark and start developing quickly, Spark's shell is the way to go.Â
Spark supports Scala, Python, R, and Java with appropriate APIs.Â
The Spark binary download offers developers two components:
- The Spark's shell
- A standalone cluster
Once the binary is downloaded and extracted (instructions will follow), the Spark shell and standalone Scala application will let you spin up a standalone cluster in standalone cluster mode.
This cluster is self-contained and private because it is local to one machine. The Spark shell allows you to easily configure this standalone cluster. Not only does it give you quick access to an interactive Scala shell, but also lets you develop a Spark application that you can deploy into the cluster (lending it the name standalone deploy mode), right in the Scala shell.Â
In this mode, the cluster's driver node and worker nodes reside on the same machine, not to mention the fact that our Spark application will take up all the cores available on that machine by default. The important feature of this mode that makes all this possible is the interactive (Spark) Scala shell.
Spark 2.3 is the latest version. It comes with over 1,400 fixes. A Spark 2.3 installation on Java 8 might be the first thing to do before we get started on our next project in Chapter 2, Build a Breast Cancer Prognosis Pipeline with the Power of Spark and Scala.
Without further ado, let's get started setting up Spark in standalone deploy mode. The following sequence of instructions are helpful:
- System checks: First make sure you have at least 8 GB of memory, leaving at least 75% of this memory for Spark. Mine has 32 GB. Once the system checks pass, download the Spark 2.3.1 binary from here:Â http://spark.apache.org/downloads.html.
- You will need a decompression utility capable of extracting the .tar.gz and .gz archives because Windows does not have native support for these archives. 7-Zip is a suitable program for this. You can obtain it from http://7-zip.org/download.html.
- Choose the package type prebuilt for Apache Hadoop 2.7 and later and download spark--2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz.
- Extract the package to someplace convenient, which will become your Spark root folder. For example, my Spark root folder is: C:\spark-2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7.
- Now, set up the environment variable, SPARK_HOME pointing to the Spark root folder. We would also need a path entry in the PATH variable to point to SPARK_HOME/bin.
- Next, set up the environment variable, HADOOP_HOME, to, say, C:\Hadoop, and create a new path entry for Spark by pointing it to the bin folder of the Spark home directory. Now, launch spark-shell like this:
spark-shell --master local[2]
What happens next might frustrate Windows users. If you are one of those users, you will run into the following error. The following screenshot is a representation of this problem:
Error message on Windows
To get around this issue, you may proceed with the following steps:
- Create a new folder as C\tmp\hive.
- Then get the missing WINUTILS.exe binary from here:Â https://github.com/steveloughran/winutils. Drop this into C\Hadoop\bin.Â
The preceding step 2 is necessary because the Spark download does not contain the WINUTILS.exe that is required to run Hadoop. That, then, is the source of the java.io.IOException.Â
With that knowledge, open up the Command Prompt window in administrator mode and execute the newly downloaded WINUTILS.EXE like this:
winutils.exe chmod -R 777 C:\tmp\hive
Next, issue the spark-shell command. This time around, Spark's interactive development environment launches normally, spinning up its own SparkContext instance sc and a SparkSession spark session, respectively. While the sc feature is a powerful entry point to the underlying local standalone cluster, spark is the main entry point to Spark's data processing APIs.
The following is the output from the spark-shell command. SparkContext is made available to you as sc and the Spark session is available to you as spark:
C:\Users\Ilango\Documents\Packt\DevProjects\Chapter1>spark-shell --master local[2]
Spark context Web UI available at http://192.168.56.1:4040
Spark context available as 'sc' (master = local[2], app id = local-1520484594646).
Spark session available as 'spark'.
Welcome to
____ __
/ __/__ ___ _____/ /__
_\ \/ _ \/ _ `/ __/ '_/
/___/ .__/\_,_/_/ /_/\_\ version 2.2.1
/_/
Using Scala version 2.11.8 (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.8.0_102)
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.
scala>
The local[2] option in the spark-shell launch shown earlier lets us run Spark locally with 2 threads.Â
Before diving into the next topic in this section, it is a good idea to understand the following Spark shell development environment features that make development and data analysis possible:
- SparkSession
- SparkBuilder
- SparkContext
- SparkConf
The SparkSession API (https://spark.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/api/scala/index.html#org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession) describes SparkSession as a programmatic access entry point to Spark's dataset and dataframe APIs, respectively.
What is SparkBuilder? The SparkBuilder companion object contains a builder method, which, when invoked, allows us to retrieve an existing SparkSession or even create one. We will now obtain our SparkSession instance in a two-step process, as follows:Â
- Import the SparkSession class.
- Invoke the builder method with getOrCreate on the resulting builder:
scala> import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession
import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession
scala> lazy val session: SparkSession = SparkSession.builder().getOrCreate()
res7: org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession = org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession@6f68756d
The SparkContext API (https://spark.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/api/scala/index.html#org.apache.spark.SparkContext) describes SparkContext as a first-line entry point for setting or configuring Spark cluster properties (RDDs, accumulators, broadcast variables, and much more) affecting the cluster's functionality. One way this configuration happens is by passing in a SparkConf instance as a SparkContext constructor parameter. One SparkContext exists per JVM instance.Â
In a sense, SparkContext is also how a Spark driver application connects to a cluster through, for example, Hadoop's Yarn ResourceManager (RM).Â
Let's inspect our Spark environment now. We will start by launching the Spark shell. That said, a typical Spark shell interactive environment screen has its own SparkSession available as  spark,  whose value we try to read off in the code block as follows:
scala> spark
res21: org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession = org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession@6f68756d
 The Spark shell also boasts of its own SparkContext instance sc, which is associated with SparkSession spark. In the following code, sc returns SparkContext:
scala> sc
res5: org.apache.spark.SparkContext = org.apache.spark.SparkContext@553ce348
sc can do more. In the following code, invoking the version method on sc gives us the version of Spark running in our cluster:Â
scala> sc.version
res2: String = 2.2.1
scala> spark
res3: org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession = org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession@6f68756d
Since sc represents a connection to the Spark cluster, it holds a special object called SparkConf, holding cluster configuration properties in an Array. Invoking the getConf method on the SparkContext yields SparkConf, whose getAll method (shown as follows) yields an Array of cluster (or connection) properties, as shown in the following code:
scala> sc.getConf.getAll
res17: Array[(String, String)] = Array((spark.driver.port,51576), (spark.debug.maxToStringFields,25), (spark.jars,""), (spark.repl.class.outputDir,C:\Users\Ilango\AppData\Local\Temp\spark-47fee33b-4c60-49d0-93aa-3e3242bee7a3\repl-e5a1acbd-6eb9-4183-8c10-656ac22f71c2), (spark.executor.id,driver), (spark.submit.deployMode,client), (spark.driver.host,192.168.56.1), (spark.app.id,local-1520484594646), (spark.master,local[2]), (spark.home,C:\spark-2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7\bin\..))
There may be references to sqlContext and sqlContext.implicits._ in the Spark shell. What is sqlContext? As of Spark 2 and the preceding versions, sqlContext is deprecated and SparkSession.builder is used instead to return a SparkSession instance, which we reiterate is the entry point to programming Spark with the dataset and dataframe API. Hence, we are going to ignore those sqlContext instances and focus on SparkSession instead.Â
Note that spark.app.name bears the default name spark-shell. Let's assign a different name to the app-name property as Iris-Pipeline. We do this by invoking the setAppName method and passing to it the new app name, as follows:
scala> sc.getConf.setAppName("Iris-Pipeline")
res22: org.apache.spark.SparkConf = org.apache.spark.SparkConf@e8ce5b1
To check if the configuration change took effect, let's invoke the getAll method again. The following output should reflect that change. It simply illustrates how SparkContext can be used to modify our cluster environment:
scala> sc.conf.getAll
res20: Array[(String, String)] = Array((spark.driver.port,51576), (spark.app.name,Spark shell), (spark.sql.catalogImplementation,hive), (spark.repl.class.uri,spark://192.168.56.1:51576/classes), (spark.debug.maxToStringFields,150), (spark.jars,""), (spark.repl.class.outputDir,C:\Users\Ilango\AppData\Local\Temp\spark-47fee33b-4c60-49d0-93aa-3e3242bee7a3\repl-e5a1acbd-6eb9-4183-8c10-656ac22f71c2), (spark.executor.id,driver), (spark.submit.deployMode,client), (spark.driver.host,192.168.56.1), (spark.app.id,local-1520484594646), (spark.master,local[2]), (spark.home,C:\spark-2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7\bin\..))
The spark.app.name property just had its value updated to the new name. Our goal in the next section is to use spark-shell to analyze data in an interactive fashion.Â
