pyspark error does not exist in the jvm error when initializing SparkContext

Question

I am using spark over emr and writing a pyspark script, I am getting an error when trying to

from pyspark import SparkContext
sc = SparkContext()

this is the error

File "pyex.py", line 5, in <module>
    sc = SparkContext()   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pyspark/context.py", line 118, in __init__
    conf, jsc, profiler_cls)   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pyspark/context.py", line 195, in _do_init
    self._encryption_enabled = self._jvm.PythonUtils.getEncryptionEnabled(self._jsc)   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/py4j/java_gateway.py", line 1487, in __getattr__
    "{0}.{1} does not exist in the JVM".format(self._fqn, name)) py4j.protocol.Py4JError: org.apache.spark.api.python.PythonUtils.getEncryptionEnabled does not exist in the JVM

I found this answer stating that I need to import sparkcontext but this is not working also.

Answer 1

PySpark recently released 2.4.0, but there's no stable release for spark coinciding with this new version. Try downgrading to pyspark 2.3.2, this fixed it for me

Edit: to be more clear your PySpark version needs to be the same as the Apache Spark version that is downloaded, or you may run into compatibility issues

Check the version of pyspark by using

pip freeze

Answer 2

I just had a fresh pyspark installation on my Windows device and was having the exact same issue. What seems to have helped is the following:

Go to your System Environment Variables and add PYTHONPATH to it with the following value: %SPARK_HOME%\python;%SPARK_HOME%\python\lib\py4j-<version>-src.zip:%PYTHONPATH%, just check what py4j version you have in your spark/python/lib folder.

The reason why I think this works is because when I installed pyspark using conda, it also downloaded a py4j version which may not be compatible with the specific version of spark, so it seems to package its own version.

Answer 3

You need to set the following environments to set the Spark path and the Py4j path.
For example in ~/.bashrc:

export SPARK_HOME=/home/hadoop/spark-2.1.0-bin-hadoop2.7
export PYTHONPATH=$SPARK_HOME/python:$SPARK_HOME/python/lib/py4j-0.10.4-src.zip:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH=$SPARK_HOME/bin:$SPARK_HOME/python:$PATH

And use findspark at the top of the your file:

import findspark
findspark.init()