One possible reason is JAVA_HOME is not set because java is not installed.
I encountered the same issue. It says
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/apache/spark/launcher/Main : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:643) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142) at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:277) at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:73) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:212) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:323) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:296) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:268) at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:406) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/conf.py", line 104, in __init__ SparkContext._ensure_initialized() File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/context.py", line 243, in _ensure_initialized SparkContext._gateway = gateway or launch_gateway() File "/opt/spark/python/pyspark/java_gateway.py", line 94, in launch_gateway raise Exception("Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number") Exception: Java gateway process exited before sending the driver its port number
at sc = pyspark.SparkConf()
. I solved it by running
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
which is from https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-java-with-apt-get-on-ubuntu-16-04