./bin/pyspark

Or if PySpark is installed with pip in your current environment:

pyspark

Spark’s primary abstraction is a distributed collection of items called a Dataset. Datasets can be created from Hadoop InputFormats (such as HDFS files) or by transforming other Datasets. Due to Python’s dynamic nature, we don’t need the Dataset to be strongly-typed in Python. As a result, all Datasets in Python are Dataset[Row], and we call it DataFrame to be consistent with the data frame concept in Pandas and R. Let’s make a new DataFrame from the text of the README file in the Spark source directory:

>>> textFile = spark.read.text("README.md")

You can get values from DataFrame directly, by calling some actions, or transform the DataFrame to get a new one. For more details, please read the API doc.

>>> textFile.count()  # Number of rows in this DataFrame
126

>>> textFile.first()  # First row in this DataFrame
Row(value=u'# Apache Spark')

Now let’s transform this DataFrame to a new one. We call filter to return a new DataFrame with a subset of the lines in the file.

>>> linesWithSpark = textFile.filter(textFile.value.contains("Spark"))

We can chain together transformations and actions:

>>> textFile.filter(textFile.value.contains("Spark")).count()  # How many lines contain "Spark"?
15

./bin/spark-shell

Spark’s primary abstraction is a distributed collection of items called a Dataset. Datasets can be created from Hadoop InputFormats (such as HDFS files) or by transforming other Datasets. Let’s make a new Dataset from the text of the README file in the Spark source directory:

scala> val textFile = spark.read.textFile("README.md")
textFile: org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset[String] = [value: string]

You can get values from Dataset directly, by calling some actions, or transform the Dataset to get a new one. For more details, please read the API doc.

scala> textFile.count() // Number of items in this Dataset
res0: Long = 126 // May be different from yours as README.md will change over time, similar to other outputs

scala> textFile.first() // First item in this Dataset
res1: String = # Apache Spark

Now let’s transform this Dataset into a new one. We call filter to return a new Dataset with a subset of the items in the file.

scala> val linesWithSpark = textFile.filter(line => line.contains("Spark"))
linesWithSpark: org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset[String] = [value: string]

We can chain together transformations and actions:

scala> textFile.filter(line => line.contains("Spark")).count() // How many lines contain "Spark"?
res3: Long = 15

>>> from pyspark.sql import functions as sf
>>> textFile.select(sf.size(sf.split(textFile.value, "\s+")).name("numWords")).agg(sf.max(sf.col("numWords"))).collect()
[Row(max(numWords)=15)]

This first maps a line to an integer value and aliases it as “numWords”, creating a new DataFrame. agg is called on that DataFrame to find the largest word count. The arguments to select and agg are both Column, we can use df.colName to get a column from a DataFrame. We can also import pyspark.sql.functions, which provides a lot of convenient functions to build a new Column from an old one.

One common data flow pattern is MapReduce, as popularized by Hadoop. Spark can implement MapReduce flows easily:

>>> wordCounts = textFile.select(sf.explode(sf.split(textFile.value, "\s+")).alias("word")).groupBy("word").count()

Here, we use the explode function in select, to transform a Dataset of lines to a Dataset of words, and then combine groupBy and count to compute the per-word counts in the file as a DataFrame of 2 columns: “word” and “count”. To collect the word counts in our shell, we can call collect:

>>> wordCounts.collect()
[Row(word=u'online', count=1), Row(word=u'graphs', count=1), ...]

scala> textFile.map(line => line.split(" ").size).reduce((a, b) => if (a > b) a else b)
res4: Int = 15

This first maps a line to an integer value, creating a new Dataset. reduce is called on that Dataset to find the largest word count. The arguments to map and reduce are Scala function literals (closures), and can use any language feature or Scala/Java library. For example, we can easily call functions declared elsewhere. We’ll use Math.max() function to make this code easier to understand:

scala> import java.lang.Math
import java.lang.Math

scala> textFile.map(line => line.split(" ").size).reduce((a, b) => Math.max(a, b))
res5: Int = 15

One common data flow pattern is MapReduce, as popularized by Hadoop. Spark can implement MapReduce flows easily:

scala> val wordCounts = textFile.flatMap(line => line.split(" ")).groupByKey(identity).count()
wordCounts: org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset[(String, Long)] = [value: string, count(1): bigint]

Here, we call flatMap to transform a Dataset of lines to a Dataset of words, and then combine groupByKey and count to compute the per-word counts in the file as a Dataset of (String, Long) pairs. To collect the word counts in our shell, we can call collect:

scala> wordCounts.collect()
res6: Array[(String, Int)] = Array((means,1), (under,2), (this,3), (Because,1), (Python,2), (agree,1), (cluster.,1), ...)

>>> linesWithSpark.cache()

>>> linesWithSpark.count()
15

>>> linesWithSpark.count()
15

It may seem silly to use Spark to explore and cache a 100-line text file. The interesting part is that these same functions can be used on very large data sets, even when they are striped across tens or hundreds of nodes. You can also do this interactively by connecting bin/pyspark to a cluster, as described in the RDD programming guide.

scala> linesWithSpark.cache()
res7: linesWithSpark.type = [value: string]

scala> linesWithSpark.count()
res8: Long = 15

scala> linesWithSpark.count()
res9: Long = 15

It may seem silly to use Spark to explore and cache a 100-line text file. The interesting part is that these same functions can be used on very large data sets, even when they are striped across tens or hundreds of nodes. You can also do this interactively by connecting bin/spark-shell to a cluster, as described in the RDD programming guide.

Now we will show how to write an application using the Python API (PySpark).

If you are building a packaged PySpark application or library you can add it to your setup.py file as:

    install_requires=[
        'pyspark==3.5.3'
    ]

As an example, we’ll create a simple Spark application, SimpleApp.py:

"""SimpleApp.py"""
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

logFile = "YOUR_SPARK_HOME/README.md"  # Should be some file on your system
spark = SparkSession.builder.appName("SimpleApp").getOrCreate()
logData = spark.read.text(logFile).cache()

numAs = logData.filter(logData.value.contains('a')).count()
numBs = logData.filter(logData.value.contains('b')).count()

print("Lines with a: %i, lines with b: %i" % (numAs, numBs))

spark.stop()

This program just counts the number of lines containing ‘a’ and the number containing ‘b’ in a text file. Note that you’ll need to replace YOUR_SPARK_HOME with the location where Spark is installed. As with the Scala and Java examples, we use a SparkSession to create Datasets. For applications that use custom classes or third-party libraries, we can also add code dependencies to spark-submit through its --py-files argument by packaging them into a .zip file (see spark-submit --help for details). SimpleApp is simple enough that we do not need to specify any code dependencies.

We can run this application using the bin/spark-submit script:

# Use spark-submit to run your application
$ YOUR_SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit \
  --master local[4] \
  SimpleApp.py
...
Lines with a: 46, Lines with b: 23

If you have PySpark pip installed into your environment (e.g., pip install pyspark), you can run your application with the regular Python interpreter or use the provided ‘spark-submit’ as you prefer.

# Use the Python interpreter to run your application
$ python SimpleApp.py
...
Lines with a: 46, Lines with b: 23

We’ll create a very simple Spark application in Scala–so simple, in fact, that it’s named SimpleApp.scala:

/* SimpleApp.scala */
import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession

object SimpleApp {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val logFile = "YOUR_SPARK_HOME/README.md" // Should be some file on your system
    val spark = SparkSession.builder.appName("Simple Application").getOrCreate()
    val logData = spark.read.textFile(logFile).cache()
    val numAs = logData.filter(line => line.contains("a")).count()
    val numBs = logData.filter(line => line.contains("b")).count()
    println(s"Lines with a: $numAs, Lines with b: $numBs")
    spark.stop()
  }
}

Note that applications should define a main() method instead of extending scala.App. Subclasses of scala.App may not work correctly.

This program just counts the number of lines containing ‘a’ and the number containing ‘b’ in the Spark README. Note that you’ll need to replace YOUR_SPARK_HOME with the location where Spark is installed. Unlike the earlier examples with the Spark shell, which initializes its own SparkSession, we initialize a SparkSession as part of the program.

We call SparkSession.builder to construct a SparkSession, then set the application name, and finally call getOrCreate to get the SparkSession instance.

Our application depends on the Spark API, so we’ll also include an sbt configuration file, build.sbt, which explains that Spark is a dependency. This file also adds a repository that Spark depends on:

name := "Simple Project"

version := "1.0"

scalaVersion := "2.12.18"

libraryDependencies += "org.apache.spark" %% "spark-sql" % "3.5.3"

For sbt to work correctly, we’ll need to layout SimpleApp.scala and build.sbt according to the typical directory structure. Once that is in place, we can create a JAR package containing the application’s code, then use the spark-submit script to run our program.

# Your directory layout should look like this
$ find .
.
./build.sbt
./src
./src/main
./src/main/scala
./src/main/scala/SimpleApp.scala

# Package a jar containing your application
$ sbt package
...
[info] Packaging {..}/{..}/target/scala-2.12/simple-project_2.12-1.0.jar

# Use spark-submit to run your application
$ YOUR_SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit \
  --class "SimpleApp" \
  --master local[4] \
  target/scala-2.12/simple-project_2.12-1.0.jar
...
Lines with a: 46, Lines with b: 23

This example will use Maven to compile an application JAR, but any similar build system will work.

We’ll create a very simple Spark application, SimpleApp.java:

/* SimpleApp.java */
import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession;
import org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset;

public class SimpleApp {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String logFile = "YOUR_SPARK_HOME/README.md"; // Should be some file on your system
    SparkSession spark = SparkSession.builder().appName("Simple Application").getOrCreate();
    Dataset<String> logData = spark.read().textFile(logFile).cache();

    long numAs = logData.filter(s -> s.contains("a")).count();
    long numBs = logData.filter(s -> s.contains("b")).count();

    System.out.println("Lines with a: " + numAs + ", lines with b: " + numBs);

    spark.stop();
  }
}

This program just counts the number of lines containing ‘a’ and the number containing ‘b’ in the Spark README. Note that you’ll need to replace YOUR_SPARK_HOME with the location where Spark is installed. Unlike the earlier examples with the Spark shell, which initializes its own SparkSession, we initialize a SparkSession as part of the program.

To build the program, we also write a Maven pom.xml file that lists Spark as a dependency. Note that Spark artifacts are tagged with a Scala version.

<project>
  <groupId>edu.berkeley</groupId>
  <artifactId>simple-project</artifactId>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <name>Simple Project</name>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency> <!-- Spark dependency -->
      <groupId>org.apache.spark</groupId>
      <artifactId>spark-sql_2.12</artifactId>
      <version>3.5.3</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

We lay out these files according to the canonical Maven directory structure:

$ find .
./pom.xml
./src
./src/main
./src/main/java
./src/main/java/SimpleApp.java

Now, we can package the application using Maven and execute it with ./bin/spark-submit.

# Package a JAR containing your application
$ mvn package
...
[INFO] Building jar: {..}/{..}/target/simple-project-1.0.jar

# Use spark-submit to run your application
$ YOUR_SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit \
  --class "SimpleApp" \
  --master local[4] \
  target/simple-project-1.0.jar
...
Lines with a: 46, Lines with b: 23