In this chapter, we will understand the environment setup of PySpark.

Note − This is considering that you have Java and Scala installed on your computer.

Let us now download and set up PySpark with the following steps.

Step 1 − Go to the official Apache Spark download page and download the latest version of Apache Spark available there. In this tutorial, we are using spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7.

Step 2 − Now, extract the downloaded Spark tar file. By default, it will get downloaded in Downloads directory.

# tar -xvf Downloads/spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz

It will create a directory spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7. Before starting PySpark, you need to set the following environments to set the Spark path and the Py4j path.

export SPARK_HOME = /home/hadoop/spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7
export PATH = $PATH:/home/hadoop/spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7/bin
export PYTHONPATH = $SPARK_HOME/python:$SPARK_HOME/python/lib/py4j-0.10.4-src.zip:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH = $SPARK_HOME/python:$PATH

Or, to set the above environments globally, put them in the .bashrc file. Then run the following command for the environments to work.

# source .bashrc

Now that we have all the environments set, let us go to Spark directory and invoke PySpark shell by running the following command −

# ./bin/pyspark

This will start your PySpark shell.

Python 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Welcome to
      ____              __
     / __/__  ___ _____/ /__
    _ / _ / _ `/ __/  ''_/
   /__ / .__/_,_/_/ /_/_   version 2.1.0
      /_/
Using Python version 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016 06:48:10)
SparkSession available as ''spark''.
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