apache/spark — pull request #799 by andrewor14 (2014-05-16 00:35:10+00:00)
Title: [SPARK-1808] Route bin/pyspark through Spark submit

**Problem.** For `bin/pyspark`, there is currently no other way to specify Spark configuration properties other than through `SPARK_JAVA_OPTS` in `conf/spark-env.sh`. However, this mechanism is supposedly deprecated. Instead, it needs to pick up configurations explicitly specified in `conf/spark-defaults.conf`.

**Solution.** Have `bin/pyspark` invoke `bin/spark-submit`, like all of its counterparts in Scala land (i.e. `bin/spark-shell`, `bin/run-example`). This has the additional benefit of making the invocation of all the user facing Spark scripts consistent.

**Details.** `bin/pyspark` inherently handles two cases: (1) running python applications and (2) running the python shell. For (1), Spark submit already handles running python applications. For cases in which `bin/pyspark` is given a python file, we can simply call pass the file directly to Spark submit and let it handle the rest.

For case (2), `bin/pyspark` starts a python process as before, which launches the JVM as a sub-process. The existing code already provides a code path to do this. All we needed to change is to use `bin/spark-submit` instead of `spark-class` to launch the JVM. This requires modifications to Spark submit to handle the pyspark shell as a special case.

This has been tested locally (OSX) for both cases, and using IPython.