Running Apache Zeppelin for SQL Server on Windows 10 natively
No docker, just Java and Windows 10
I’ve finally had some “free” time to create a binary distribution package for Apache Zeppelin for SQL Server, and figure out how to make it work natively under Windows 10 without the need of a container service like Docker.
If you don’t want or can’t install Docker this is the way to go. I will still keep using Docker as a distribution platform because it is directly tied to my GitHub repository and in that way I can have the docker image automatically build each time I check in my source code. Creating and releasing the native distribution is a manual process for now, so it will take couple of days more than the docker image. The binary distribution package doesn’t contain the source code and this make it way smaller that the docker image, which also come with Linux Ubuntu installed. Right now the .zip file with the binary package is less than 150 Mb, while the docker image is near 1 Gb.
Choose the distribution format you prefer and start to use Zeppelin.
Installing Java
First of all you need to install Java Runtime Engine. The latest version, as of today, is the JRE 1.8.0_121. You can get it from https://java.com or via chocolatey.
Once Java is installed, make sure you set the JAVA_HOME environment variable on your machine, by editing the System Environment Variables. you can easily access the window where you can do so by searching for “system environment variables” in the Cortana Search Box. Here’s the result:
Click on the highlighted menu item and the “System Properties” window will pop-up. From there click on the “Environment Variables” button to open the window with the same name:
If the JAVA_HOME is not there, create a new system variable with that name and set its value to the folder where Java has been installed.
Now restart the machine (otherwise you may have some problems later, having Apache Zeppelin complaining that some Java classes cannot be found).
Installing Apache Zeppelin
You can now download the Apache Zeppelin for SQL Server binary package from here:
https://zeppelinsqlserver.blob.core.windows.net/releases/Zeppelin_0.7-R2.zip
the package contains the latest version (again, as of today) which is the 0.7-R2. Unpack the content of the downloaded .zip file into a directory of your choice
now open a command prompt into that folder and run
.\bin\zeppelin.cmd
please note that starting everything can take a while…like up to 1 minute. Zeppelin will be ready when you can see this text:
({main} ZeppelinServer.java[main]:190) — Done, zeppelin server started
Use Zeppelin
You can now enjoy your Apache Zeppelin instance at
http://localhost:8080
To shut-down zeppelin, you just send a ctrl-c in the command prompt.