Pointing to an external Spark Cluster

Running Zeppelin with built-in Spark is all good, but in most of our cases, we'll be executing the Spark jobs initiated by Zeppelin on a cluster of workers. Achieving this is pretty simple: we need to configure Zeppelin to point its Spark master property to an external Spark master URL. Let's take for example a simple and standalone external Spark cluster running on my local machine. Please note that we will have to run Zeppelin on a different port because of the Zeppelin UI port's conflict with the Spark standalone cluster master web UI over 8080.

Let's bring up the Spark Cluster. From inside your Spark source, execute the following:

sbin/start-all.sh

How to do it…

1. Finally, let's modify conf/interpreter.json and conf/zeppelin-env.sh to point the master property to the host on which the Spark VM is running. In this case, it will be my localhost, with the port being 7077, which is the default master port:

2. The conf/interpreter.json file looks like the following...