taupirho / scala-spark-on-pc

Setting up your PC for SCALA/Spark development and running your first code

Setting up your PC for SCALA/Spark development and running your first code

Carry out the following steps to create a SCALA/SPARK/HADOOP development environment on your local windows PC. Note that it won't be a proper version of HADOOP we'll install, rather we will fool your PC into thinking there's a real version of HADOOP installed that will enable you to submit SPARK jobs to run.

Install the JAVA development kit

SCALA compiles down to JAVA byte code and is able to take advantage of existing JAVA libraries therefore we need to install a JAVA development kit. You can get this from www.oracle.com. Choose the latest version appropriate to you operating system, download it and follow the installation instructions.

Install SPARK

You can get a pre-built version of SPARK from spark.apache.org. Make sure you get one pre-built for Hadoop. It will download in a .tgz format which is a UNIX type compressed format which windows will unlikely recognise off the bat. If so, there is a utility called WinRAR which you can download from www.rarlab.com which will read this kind of file. Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped the .tgz file copy the unzipped contents to somewhere like c:\spark on your PC.

Install winutils.exe

We need to trick windows into thinking that HADOOP is installed on it and to do this there is a program called winutils.exe that you need to download and install onto your PC. Search for it on Google and make sure it’s virus free before installing it. Create a directory c:\winutils\bin on your PC and copy the winutils.exe program to that location. You don’t run it explicitly, it will run as and when needed.

Set-up some environment variables

The following environment variables now need to be set up

Variable	Value
SPARK_HOME	SPARK install directory e.g c:\spark
JAVA_HOME	JAVA JDK install directory e.g c:\program files\java\jdk1.8
HADOOP_HOME	Directory where bin/winutils.exe lives in e.g c:\winutils

Lastly you need to amend your PATH environment variable and add the following to it.

%SPARK_HOME%\bin

%JAVA_HOME%\bin

Install a SCALA IDE

There are a number to choose from but the one I use is based on Eclipse. You can get it from www.scala-ide.org. Again just download the zip, uncompress it and copy its contents to, for example, c:\eclipse

To check that the Spark installation is OK, go to wherever you installed  Spark, open up a command window and type in spark-shell. After a minute or so you should see something similar to this:

If you don’t see this then something has gone wrong and you should re-visit all the steps described above and make sure all is OK with them. Similarly for the IDE, just go to where the eclipse.exe lives and double click on it. If its the first time running it, you should see an eclipse launcher window appear prompting you to select a development workspace, otherwise the normal eclipse IDE window will appear.

Now, for our very first SPARK/SCALA program we will do a simple wordcount program on a text file. Handily, the c:\spark sub-directory has an existing file we can use called README.md. If you type this file from a DOS command window you can see its contents. Now, make sure you are in the c:\spark directory and type spark-shell. Once you have the SCALA> prompt, type in the following lines of code:

scala> val rdd = sc.textFile("README.md")

rdd: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[String] = README.md MapPartitionsRDD[1] at textFile at <console>:24

scala> rdd.count()

res0: Long = 99

scala>:quit

There you go, it shows the file has 99 lines and you just ran your first Spark/Scala code !