The official repository for the Rock the JVM Spark Essentials with Scala course

May 14, 2026 · View on GitHub

This repository contains the code we wrote during Rock the JVM's Spark Essentials with Scala (Udemy version here). Unless explicitly mentioned, the code in this repository is exactly what was caught on camera.

Prerequisites

Note: Spark 4.x requires Java 17 or 21. Java 8 and 11 are no longer supported.

How to install

  • Install Docker
  • Install JDK 17 or 21 (Eclipse Temurin recommended)
  • Either clone the repo or download as zip
  • Open with IntelliJ as an SBT project
  • Windows users: you need to set up some Hadoop-related configs — use this guide
  • In a terminal window, navigate to the folder where you downloaded this repo and run docker compose up to start PostgreSQL and the Spark cluster
  • To spin up multiple Spark workers: docker compose up --scale spark-worker=3
  • Access the Spark Master UI at http://localhost:9090

Connecting to PostgreSQL

docker exec -it postgres psql -U docker -d rtjvm

Connecting to the Spark Cluster

# Open a shell on the Spark master
docker exec -it spark-master bash

# Launch the Spark shell
/opt/spark/bin/spark-shell --master spark://spark-master:7077

# Launch the Spark SQL shell
/opt/spark/bin/spark-sql --master spark://spark-master:7077

Submitting a JAR to the Cluster

  1. Build the JAR: sbt package (or use IntelliJ Build Artifacts)
  2. Copy the JAR and any data files to spark-apps/
  3. Submit from inside the master container:
docker exec -it spark-master /opt/spark/bin/spark-submit \
  --class part6practical.TestDeployApp \
  --master spark://spark-master:7077 \
  --deploy-mode client \
  /opt/spark-apps/spark-essentials_2.13-0.3.jar /opt/spark-apps/movies.json /opt/spark-apps/goodMovies

How to use the code

Clone this repository and checkout the start tag by running the following in the repo folder:

git checkout start

How to see the final code

Udemy students: checkout the udemy branch of the repo:

git checkout udemy

Rock the JVM students: checkout the master branch:

git checkout master

For questions or suggestions

If you have changes to suggest to this repo, either

  • submit a GitHub issue
  • tell me in the course Q/A forum
  • submit a pull request!