HBase Shell Interpreter for Apache Zeppelin

Overview

HBase Shell is a JRuby IRB client for Apache HBase. This interpreter provides all capabilities of Apache HBase shell within Apache Zeppelin. The interpreter assumes that Apache HBase client software has been installed and it can connect to the Apache HBase cluster from the machine on where Apache Zeppelin is installed.
To get start with HBase, please see HBase Quickstart.

HBase release supported

By default, Zeppelin is built against HBase 1.0.x releases. To work with HBase 1.1.x releases, use the following build command:

# HBase 1.1.4
mvn clean package -DskipTests -Phadoop-2.6 -Dhadoop.version=2.6.0 -P build-distr -Dhbase.hbase.version=1.1.4 -Dhbase.hadoop.version=2.6.0

To work with HBase 1.2.0+, use the following build command:

# HBase 1.2.0
mvn clean package -DskipTests -Phadoop-2.6 -Dhadoop.version=2.6.0 -P build-distr -Dhbase.hbase.version=1.2.0 -Dhbase.hadoop.version=2.6.0

Configuration

Property Default Description
hbase.home /usr/lib/hbase Installation directory of HBase, defaults to HBASE_HOME in environment
hbase.ruby.sources lib/ruby Path to Ruby scripts relative to 'hbase.home'
zeppelin.hbase.test.mode false Disable checks for unit and manual tests

If you want to connect to HBase running on a cluster, you'll need to follow the next step.

Export HBASE_HOME

In conf/zeppelin-env.sh, export HBASE_HOME environment variable with your HBase installation path. This ensures hbase-site.xml can be loaded.

For example

export HBASE_HOME=/usr/lib/hbase

or, when running with CDH

export HBASE_HOME="/opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH/lib/hbase"

You can optionally export HBASE_CONF_DIR instead of HBASE_HOME should you have custom HBase configurations.

Enabling the HBase Shell Interpreter

In a notebook, to enable the HBase Shell interpreter, click the Gear icon and select HBase Shell.

Using the HBase Shell Interpreter

In a paragraph, use %hbase to select the HBase Shell interpreter and then input all commands. To get the list of available commands, use help.

%hbase
help

For example, to create a table

%hbase
create 'test', 'cf'

And then to put data into that table

%hbase
put 'test', 'row1', 'cf:a', 'value1'

For more information on all commands available, refer to HBase shell commands.