Pyspark: Exception: Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number

Question

I'm trying to run pyspark on my macbook air. When i try starting it up I get the error:

Exception: Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number

when sc = SparkContext() is being called upon startup. I have tried running the following commands:

./bin/pyspark
./bin/spark-shell
export PYSPARK_SUBMIT_ARGS="--master local[2] pyspark-shell"

with no avail. I have also looked here:

Spark + Python - Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number?

but the question has never been answered. Please help! Thanks.

Answer 1

One possible reason is JAVA_HOME is not set because java is not installed.

I encountered the same issue. It says

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/apache/spark/launcher/Main : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:643)
    at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:277)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:73)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:212)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:323)
    at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:296)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:268)
    at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:406)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/conf.py", line 104, in __init__
    SparkContext._ensure_initialized()
  File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/context.py", line 243, in _ensure_initialized
    SparkContext._gateway = gateway or launch_gateway()
  File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/java_gateway.py", line 94, in launch_gateway
    raise Exception("Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number")
Exception: Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number

at sc = pyspark.SparkConf(). I solved it by running

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

which is from https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-java-with-apt-get-on-ubuntu-16-04