How to set a custom environment variable in EMR to be available for a spark Application

Question

I need to set a custom environment variable in EMR to be available when running a spark application.

I have tried adding this:

                   ...
                   --configurations '[                                    
                                      {
                                      "Classification": "spark-env",
                                      "Configurations": [
                                        {
                                        "Classification": "export",
                                        "Configurations": [],
                                        "Properties": { "SOME-ENV-VAR": "qa1" }
                                        }
                                      ],
                                      "Properties": {}
                                      }
                                      ]'
                   ...

and also tried to replace "spark-env with hadoop-env but nothing seems to work.

There is this answer from the aws forums. but I can't figure out how to apply it. I'm running on EMR 5.3.1 and launch it with a preconfigured step from the cli: aws emr create-cluster...

Answer 1

Add the custom configurations like below JSON to a file say, custom_config.json

[   
  {
   "Classification": "spark-env",
   "Properties": {},
   "Configurations": [
       {
         "Classification": "export",
         "Properties": {
             "VARIABLE_NAME": VARIABLE_VALUE,
         }
       }
   ]
 }
]

And, On creating the emr cluster, pass the file reference to the --configurations option

aws emr create-cluster --configurations file://custom_config.json --other-options...