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I updated my PATH to look like this:

PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH:/home/username/Installs/Spark/bin"

I think it worked as I managed to call spark-shell from a different folder (although I'm wondering if I'm going crazy and it was really from the bin folder). However after rebooting Ubuntu it no longer seems to work. Why?

Could not find valid SPARK_HOME while searching ['/home/username', '/usr/local/bin']
/usr/local/bin/spark-shell: line 57: /bin/spark-submit: No such file or directory

Answers

Setting

PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH:/home/username/Installs/Spark/bin"

would enable to run the executable scripts like spark-shell, spark-submit, pyspark etc. without need to give full path to the scripts.

Besides setting PATH, you would need to set

SPARK_HOME=/home/username/Installs/Spark

which is used internally when you start spark cluster or when you use spark-submit.

If you are setting the variables in .bashrc file, you need export keyword too as

export SPARK_HOME=/home/username/Installs/Spark

and if you don't want to reboot Ubuntu to test it worked type

. ~/.profile

into the command line then try your spark command.