I decided to teach myself how to work with big data and came across. While I had heard of, to use Hadoop for working with big data, I had to write code in Java which I was not really looking forward to as I love to write code in Python. Spark supports a Python programming API called that is actively maintained and was enough to convince me to start learning PySpark for working with big data. In this post, I describe how I got started with PySpark on Windows. My laptop is running Windows 10.

So the screenshots are specific to Windows 10. I am also assuming that you are comfortable working with the Command Prompt on Windows. You do not have to be an expert, but you need to know how to start a Command Prompt and run commands such as those that help you move around your computer’s file system. In case you need a refresher, a quick might be handy. Often times, many open source projects do not have good Windows support. So I had to first figure out if Spark and PySpark would work well on Windows.

The official Spark does mention about supporting Windows. Installing Prerequisites PySpark requires Java version 7 or later and Python version 2.6 or later. Let’s first check if they are already installed or install them and make sure that PySpark can work with these two components. Java Java is used by many other software.

So it is quite possible that a required version (in our case version 7 or later) is already available on your computer. To check if Java is available and find it’s version, open a Command Prompt and type the following command. 'java' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. It means you need to install Java.

To do so, • Go to the Java page. In case the download link has changed, search for Java SE Runtime Environment on the internet and you should be able to find the download page.

• Click the Download button beneath JRE • Accept the license agreement and download the latest version of Java SE Runtime Environment installer. I suggest getting the exe for Windows x64 (such as jre-8u92-windows-x64.exe) unless you are using a 32 bit version of Windows in which case you need to get the Windows x86 Offline version. Wilcom Embroidery Studio E2 Free With Crackers.

Winutils - Windows binaries for Hadoop versions (built from the git commit ID used for the ASF relase).

• Run the installer. After the installation is complete, close the Command Prompt if it was already open, open it and check if you can successfully run java -version command. Python Python is used by many other software. So it is quite possible that a required version (in our case version 2.6 or later) is already available on your computer. To check if Python is available and find it’s version, open a Command Prompt and type the following command. 'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. It means you need to install Python.

To do so, • Go to the Python page. • Click the Latest Python 2 Release link. • Download the Windows x86-64 MSI installer file. If you are using a 32 bit version of Windows download the Windows x86 MSI installer file. • When you run the installer, on the Customize Python section, make sure that the option Add python.exe to Path is selected.

If this option is not selected, some of the PySpark utilities such as pyspark and spark-submit might not work. After the installation is complete, close the Command Prompt if it was already open, open it and check if you can successfully run python --version command. Installing Apache Spark • Go to the Spark page. • For Choose a Spark release, select the latest stable release of Spark.

• For Choose a package type, select a version that is pre-built for the latest version of Hadoop such as Pre-built for Hadoop 2.6. • For Choose a download type, select Direct Download. • Click the link next to Download Spark to download a zipped tarball file ending in.tgz extension such as spark-1.6.2-bin-hadoop2.6.tgz. • In order to install Apache Spark, there is no need to run any installer.

You can extract the files from the downloaded tarball in any folder of your choice using the tool. Make sure that the folder path and the folder name containing Spark files do not contain any spaces. In my case, I created a folder called spark on my C drive and extracted the zipped tarball in a folder called spark-1.6.2-bin-hadoop2.6. So all Spark files are in a folder called C: spark spark-1.6.2-bin-hadoop2.6.

From now on, I will refer to this folder as SPARK_HOME in this post. To test if your installation was successful, open a Command Prompt, change to SPARK_HOME directory and type bin pyspark. This should start the PySpark shell which can be used to interactively work with Spark. I got the following messages in the console after running bin pyspark command. Python 2.7.10 ( default, May 23 2015, 09:44:00 ) [ MSC v.1500 64 bit ( AMD64 ) ] on win32 Type 'help', 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information. Using Spark 's default log4j profile: org/apache/spark/log4j-defaults.properties 16/07/09 15:44:10 INFO SparkContext: Running Spark version 1.6.2 16/07/09 15:44:10 WARN NativeCodeLoader: Unable to load native-hadoop library for your platform. Using builtin-java classes where applicable 16/07/09 15:44:10 ERROR Shell: Failed to locate the winutils binary in the hadoop binary path java.io.IOException: Could not locate executable null bin winutils.exe in the Hadoop binaries.