Write single CSV file using spark-csv

Question

It is creating a folder with multiple files, because each partition is saved individually. If you need a single output file (still in a folder) you can repartition (preferred if upstream data is large, but requires a shuffle):

df
   .repartition(1)
   .write.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
   .option("header", "true")
   .save("mydata.csv")

or coalesce:

df
   .coalesce(1)
   .write.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
   .option("header", "true")
   .save("mydata.csv")

data frame before saving:

All data will be written to mydata.csv/part-00000. Before you use this option be sure you understand what is going on and what is the cost of transferring all data to a single worker. If you use distributed file system with replication, data will be transfered multiple times - first fetched to a single worker and subsequently distributed over storage nodes.

Alternatively you can leave your code as it is and use general purpose tools like cat or HDFS getmerge to simply merge all the parts afterwards.

If you are running Spark with HDFS, I've been solving the problem by writing csv files normally and leveraging HDFS to do the merging. I'm doing that in Spark (1.6) directly:

import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration
import org.apache.hadoop.fs._

def merge(srcPath: String, dstPath: String): Unit =  {
   val hadoopConfig = new Configuration()
   val hdfs = FileSystem.get(hadoopConfig)
   FileUtil.copyMerge(hdfs, new Path(srcPath), hdfs, new Path(dstPath), true, hadoopConfig, null) 
   // the "true" setting deletes the source files once they are merged into the new output
}


val newData = << create your dataframe >>


val outputfile = "/user/feeds/project/outputs/subject"  
var filename = "myinsights"
var outputFileName = outputfile + "/temp_" + filename 
var mergedFileName = outputfile + "/merged_" + filename
var mergeFindGlob  = outputFileName

    newData.write
        .format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
        .option("header", "false")
        .mode("overwrite")
        .save(outputFileName)
    merge(mergeFindGlob, mergedFileName )
    newData.unpersist()

Can't remember where I learned this trick, but it might work for you.

I might be a little late to the game here, but using coalesce(1) or repartition(1) may work for small data-sets, but large data-sets would all be thrown into one partition on one node. This is likely to throw OOM errors, or at best, to process slowly.

I would highly suggest that you use the FileUtil.copyMerge() function from the Hadoop API. This will merge the outputs into a single file.

EDIT - This effectively brings the data to the driver rather than an executor node. Coalesce() would be fine if a single executor has more RAM for use than the driver.

EDIT 2: copyMerge() is being removed in Hadoop 3.0. See the following stack overflow article for more information on how to work with the newest version: How to do CopyMerge in Hadoop 3.0?

If you are using Databricks and can fit all the data into RAM on one worker (and thus can use .coalesce(1)), you can use dbfs to find and move the resulting CSV file:

val fileprefix= "/mnt/aws/path/file-prefix"

dataset
  .coalesce(1)       
  .write             
//.mode("overwrite") // I usually don't use this, but you may want to.
  .option("header", "true")
  .option("delimiter","\t")
  .csv(fileprefix+".tmp")

val partition_path = dbutils.fs.ls(fileprefix+".tmp/")
     .filter(file=>file.name.endsWith(".csv"))(0).path

dbutils.fs.cp(partition_path,fileprefix+".tab")

dbutils.fs.rm(fileprefix+".tmp",recurse=true)

If your file does not fit into RAM on the worker, you may want to consider chaotic3quilibrium's suggestion to use FileUtils.copyMerge(). I have not done this, and don't yet know if is possible or not, e.g., on S3.

This answer is built on previous answers to this question as well as my own tests of the provided code snippet. I originally posted it to Databricks and am republishing it here.

The best documentation for dbfs's rm's recursive option I have found is on a Databricks forum.

spark's df.write() API will create multiple part files inside given path ... to force spark write only a single part file use df.coalesce(1).write.csv(...) instead of df.repartition(1).write.csv(...) as coalesce is a narrow transformation whereas repartition is a wide transformation see Spark - repartition() vs coalesce()

df.coalesce(1).write.csv(filepath,header=True) 

will create folder in given filepath with one part-0001-...-c000.csv file use

cat filepath/part-0001-...-c000.csv > filename_you_want.csv 

to have a user friendly filename

I'm using this in Python to get a single file:

df.toPandas().to_csv("/tmp/my.csv", sep=',', header=True, index=False)

This answer expands on the accepted answer, gives more context, and provides code snippets you can run in the Spark Shell on your machine.

More context on accepted answer

The accepted answer might give you the impression the sample code outputs a single mydata.csv file and that's not the case. Let's demonstrate:

val df = Seq("one", "two", "three").toDF("num")
df
  .repartition(1)
  .write.csv(sys.env("HOME")+ "/Documents/tmp/mydata.csv")

Here's what's outputted:

Documents/
  tmp/
    mydata.csv/
      _SUCCESS
      part-00000-b3700504-e58b-4552-880b-e7b52c60157e-c000.csv

N.B. mydata.csv is a folder in the accepted answer - it's not a file!

How to output a single file with a specific name

We can use spark-daria to write out a single mydata.csv file.

import com.github.mrpowers.spark.daria.sql.DariaWriters
DariaWriters.writeSingleFile(
    df = df,
    format = "csv",
    sc = spark.sparkContext,
    tmpFolder = sys.env("HOME") + "/Documents/better/staging",
    filename = sys.env("HOME") + "/Documents/better/mydata.csv"
)

This'll output the file as follows:

Documents/
  better/
    mydata.csv

S3 paths

You'll need to pass s3a paths to DariaWriters.writeSingleFile to use this method in S3:

DariaWriters.writeSingleFile(
    df = df,
    format = "csv",
    sc = spark.sparkContext,
    tmpFolder = "s3a://bucket/data/src",
    filename = "s3a://bucket/data/dest/my_cool_file.csv"
)

See here for more info.

Avoiding copyMerge

copyMerge was removed from Hadoop 3. The DariaWriters.writeSingleFile implementation uses fs.rename, as described here. Spark 3 still used Hadoop 2, so copyMerge implementations will work in 2020. I'm not sure when Spark will upgrade to Hadoop 3, but better to avoid any copyMerge approach that'll cause your code to break when Spark upgrades Hadoop.

Source code

Look for the DariaWriters object in the spark-daria source code if you'd like to inspect the implementation.

PySpark implementation

It's easier to write out a single file with PySpark because you can convert the DataFrame to a Pandas DataFrame that gets written out as a single file by default.

from pathlib import Path
home = str(Path.home())
data = [
    ("jellyfish", "JALYF"),
    ("li", "L"),
    ("luisa", "LAS"),
    (None, None)
]
df = spark.createDataFrame(data, ["word", "expected"])
df.toPandas().to_csv(home + "/Documents/tmp/mydata-from-pyspark.csv", sep=',', header=True, index=False)

Limitations

The DariaWriters.writeSingleFile Scala approach and the df.toPandas() Python approach only work for small datasets. Huge datasets can not be written out as single files. Writing out data as a single file isn't optimal from a performance perspective because the data can't be written in parallel.