SparkR is an R package that provides a light-weight frontend to use Spark from R.
Build Spark with Maven and include the -Psparkr
profile to build the R package. For example to use the default Hadoop versions you can run
build/mvn -DskipTests -Psparkr package
You can start using SparkR by launching the SparkR shell with
./bin/sparkR
The sparkR
script automatically creates a SparkContext with Spark by default in
local mode. To specify the Spark master of a cluster for the automatically created
SparkContext, you can run
./bin/sparkR --master "local[2]"
To set other options like driver memory, executor memory etc. you can pass in the spark-submit arguments to ./bin/sparkR
If you wish to use SparkR from RStudio or other R frontends you will need to set some environment variables which point SparkR to your Spark installation. For example
# Set this to where Spark is installed
Sys.setenv(SPARK_HOME="/Users/shivaram/spark")
# This line loads SparkR from the installed directory
.libPaths(c(file.path(Sys.getenv("SPARK_HOME"), "R", "lib"), .libPaths()))
library(SparkR)
sc <- sparkR.init(master="local")
The instructions for making contributions to Spark also apply to SparkR.
If you only make R file changes (i.e. no Scala changes) then you can just re-install the R package using R/install-dev.sh
and test your changes.
Once you have made your changes, please include unit tests for them and run existing unit tests using the run-tests.sh
script as described below.
The SparkR documentation (Rd files and HTML files) are not a part of the source repository. To generate them you can run the script R/create-docs.sh
. This script uses devtools
and knitr
to generate the docs and these packages need to be installed on the machine before using the script.
SparkR comes with several sample programs in the examples/src/main/r
directory.
To run one of them, use ./bin/sparkR <filename> <args>
. For example:
./bin/sparkR examples/src/main/r/dataframe.R
You can also run the unit-tests for SparkR by running (you need to install the testthat package first):
R -e 'install.packages("testthat", repos="http://cran.us.r-project.org")'
./R/run-tests.sh
The ./bin/spark-submit
and ./bin/sparkR
can also be used to submit jobs to YARN clusters. You will need to set YARN conf dir before doing so. For example on CDH you can run
export YARN_CONF_DIR=/etc/hadoop/conf
./bin/spark-submit --master yarn examples/src/main/r/dataframe.R