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()
         


        

Answer 1

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--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.