Can't Delete HDFS Directory Via Web Interface Because I'm Dr. Who

Question

I'm trying to delete the directory deepnlptest/models on a local HDFS system using the web interface at http://localhost:50070/explorer.html. My username is wmcneill and permissions on the HDFS directory I am trying to delete and the enclosing one are drwxr-xr-x owned by wmcneill.

$ hdfs dfs -ls deepnlptest
17/11/16 09:36:11 WARN util.NativeCodeLoader: Unable to load native-hadoop library for your platform... using builtin-java classes where applicable
Found 5 items
drwxr-xr-x   - wmcneill supergroup          0 2017-11-15 17:09 deepnlptest/canonical-folders
drwxr-xr-x   - wmcneill supergroup          0 2017-11-08 14:35 deepnlptest/data
drwxr-xr-x   - wmcneill supergroup          0 2017-11-15 16:51 deepnlptest/embeddings
drwxr-xr-x   - wmcneill supergroup          0 2017-11-15 16:53 deepnlptest/models
drwxr-xr-x   - wmcneill supergroup          0 2017-11-09 10:28 deepnlptest/pretrained_embeddings

I get the following error when I try to use the web interface to delete the directory.

Except for deleting, the web interface works fine for browsing HDFS. I am able to do everything on the HDFS system via the command line command hdfs dfs including deleting the directory.

$ hdfs dfs -rm -r deepnlptest/models
17/11/16 09:37:17 WARN util.NativeCodeLoader: Unable to load native-hadoop library for your platform... using builtin-java classes where applicable
Deleted deepnlptest/models

I assume that "dr.who" is a default user and I need to add my username to some Hadoop configuration file, but I can't figure out which one.

I'm running Hadoop 2.8.2 on a Mac installed beneath /usr/local/Cellar/hadoop/2.8.2.

Answer 1

In case anyone is still looking at this, you can set your user by setting the property in the core-site.xml as such

<configuration>
...
    <property>
        <name>hadoop.http.staticuser.user</name>
        <value>youruserhere</value>
    </property>
...
</configuration>

That should override the dr.who default user and allow you to delete/upload from the web interface.