r - Installing of SparkR

Question

I have the last version of R - 3.2.1. Now I want to install SparkR on R. After I execute:

> install.packages("SparkR")

I got back:

Installing package into ‘/home/user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘SparkR’ is not available (for R version 3.2.1)

I have also installed Spark on my machine

Spark 1.4.0

How I can solve this problem?

Answer 1

You can install directly from a GitHub repository:

if (!require('devtools')) install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('apache/[email protected]', subdir='R/pkg')

You should choose tag (v2.x.x above) corresponding to the version of Spark you use. You can find a full list of tags on the project page or directly from R using GitHub API:

jsonlite::fromJSON("https://api.github.com/repos/apache/spark/tags")$name

If you've downloaded binary package from a downloads page R library is in a R/lib/SparkR subdirectory. It can be used to install SparkR directly. For example:

$ export SPARK_HOME=/path/to/spark/directory
$ cd $SPARK_HOME/R/pkg/
$ R -e "devtools::install('.')"

You can also add R lib to .libPaths (taken from here):

Sys.setenv(SPARK_HOME='/path/to/spark/directory')
.libPaths(c(file.path(Sys.getenv('SPARK_HOME'), 'R', 'lib'), .libPaths()))

Finally, you can use sparkR shell without any additional steps:

$ /path/to/spark/directory/bin/sparkR

Edit

According to Spark 2.1.0 Release Notes should be available on CRAN in the future:

Standalone installable package built with the Apache Spark release. We will be submitting this to CRAN soon.

You can follow SPARK-15799 to check the progress.

Edit 2

While SPARK-15799 has been merged, satisfying CRAN requirements proved to be challenging (see for example discussions about 2.2.2, 2.3.1, 2.4.0), and the packages has been subsequently removed (see for example SparkR was removed from CRAN on 2018-05-01, CRAN SparkR package removed?). As the result methods listed in the original post are still the most reliable solutions.

Edit 3

OK, SparkR is back up on CRAN again, v2.4.1. install.packages('SparkR') should work again (it may take a couple of days for the mirrors to reflect this)