1. Visit Apache Spark Downloads page

   http://spark.apache.org/downloads.html

2. Select following options

   1. Choose a Spark release: 2.2.x or greater (I'll be using 2.2.1)
   2. Choose a package type: Pre-built for Apache Hadoop 2.7 and later
   3. Download Spark: spark-2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz

   Download that tar compressed file to your local machine.

3. After downloading the compressed file, unzip it to desired location:

   $ tar -xvzf spark-2.2.1-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz -C /home/prakshi/spark-2.2.1/

4. Setting up the environment for Spark:

   To set up environment variable:

   Add following lines to your ~/.bashrc

   export SPARK_HOME=/home/prakshi/spark-2.2.1/
   export PATH=$SPARK_HOME/bin:$PATH

   Make sure you change the path in SPARK_HOME as per your spark software file are located. Reload your ~/.bashrc file using:

   $ source ~/.bashrc
   

5. That's all! Spark has been set-up. Try running pyspark command to use Spark from Python.

Two methods to do so.

1. Configure PySpark driver Update PySpark driver environment variables: add these lines to your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc) file.

   export PYSPARK_DRIVER_PYTHON=jupyter
   export PYSPARK_DRIVER_PYTHON_OPTS='notebook'

   Restart your terminal and launch PySpark again:

   $ pyspark

   Now, this command should start a Jupyter Notebook in your web browser.

2. Using findspark module

   findSpark package is not specific to Jupyter Notebook, you can use this trick in your favorite IDE too.

   To install findspark:

   $ pip install findspark

   Irrespective of Jupyter notebook/Python script all you need to do to use spark is add following line in your code:

   import findspark
   findspark.init()