importing pyspark in python shell

Question

This is a copy of someone else's question on another forum that was never answered, so I thought I'd re-ask it here, as I have the same issue. (See http://geekple.com/blogs/feeds/Xgzu7/posts/351703064084736)

I have Spark installed properly on my machine and am able to run python programs with the pyspark modules without error when using ./bin/pyspark as my python interpreter.

However, when I attempt to run the regular Python shell, when I try to import pyspark modules I get this error:

from pyspark import SparkContext

and it says

"No module named pyspark".

How can I fix this? Is there an environment variable I need to set to point Python to the pyspark headers/libraries/etc.? If my spark installation is /spark/, which pyspark paths do I need to include? Or can pyspark programs only be run from the pyspark interpreter?

Answer 1

Here is a simple method (If you don't bother about how it works!!!)

Use findspark

1. Go to your python shell

   pip install findspark
   
   import findspark
   findspark.init()
   

2. import the necessary modules

   from pyspark import SparkContext
   from pyspark import SparkConf
   

3. Done!!!