Spark Properties and spark-defaults.conf Properties File¶

Spark properties are the means of tuning the execution environment of a Spark application.

The default Spark properties file is <$SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf>> that could be overriden using spark-submit with the spark-submit/index.md#properties-file[--properties-file] command-line option.

.Environment Variables [options="header",width="100%"] |=== | Environment Variable | Default Value | Description | SPARK_CONF_DIR | $\{SPARK_HOME}/conf | Spark's configuration directory (with spark-defaults.conf) |===

TIP: Read the official documentation of Apache Spark on http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/configuration.html[Spark Configuration].

=== [[spark-defaults-conf]] spark-defaults.conf -- Default Spark Properties File

spark-defaults.conf (under SPARK_CONF_DIR or $SPARK_HOME/conf) is the default properties file with the Spark properties of your Spark applications.

NOTE: spark-defaults.conf is loaded by spark-AbstractCommandBuilder.md#loadPropertiesFile[AbstractCommandBuilder's loadPropertiesFile internal method].

=== [[getDefaultPropertiesFile]] Calculating Path of Default Spark Properties -- Utils.getDefaultPropertiesFile method

[source, scala]¶

getDefaultPropertiesFile(env: Map[String, String] = sys.env): String¶

getDefaultPropertiesFile calculates the absolute path to spark-defaults.conf properties file that can be either in directory specified by SPARK_CONF_DIR environment variable or $SPARK_HOME/conf directory.

NOTE: getDefaultPropertiesFile is part of private[spark] org.apache.spark.util.Utils object.