Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables you to do data analytics in an interactive way. Using Zeppelin, you can make beautiful, data-driven, interactive, and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala, and more. The Apache Zeppelin interpreter concept allows any language/data processing backend to be plugged into Zeppelin. Currently, Apache Zeppelin supports many interpreters such as Apache Spark, Python, JDBC, Markdown, and Shell.

Apache Zeppelin is a relatively newer technology from Apache Software Foundation that enables the data scientist, engineer, and practitioner to do data exploration, visualization, sharing, and collaboration with multiple programming language backends (such as Python, Scala, Hive, SparkSQL, Shell, Markdown, and more). Since using other interpreters is not the goal of this book, we'll be using Spark on Zeppelin, and all the codes will be written using Scala. In this section, therefore, we will show you how to configure Zeppelin using a binary package that contains only the Spark interpreter. Apache Zeppelin officially supports, and is tested in, the following environments:

As shown in the preceding table, Java is required to execute Spark code on Zeppelin. Therefore, if it is not set up, install and set up java on any of the platforms mentioned earlier. The latest release of Apache Zeppelin can be downloaded from https://zeppelin.apache.org/download.html. Each release has three options:

• Binary package with all interpreters: Contains all the support for many interpreters. For example, Spark, JDBC, Pig, Beam, Scio, BigQuery, Python, Livy, HDFS, Alluxio, Hbase, Scalding, Elasticsearch, Angular, Markdown, Shell, Flink, Hive, Tajo, Cassandra, Geode, Ignite, Kylin, Lens, Phoenix, and PostgreSQL are currently supported in Zeppelin.
• Binary package with Spark interpreter: Usually, this contains only the Spark interpreter. It also contains an interpreter net-install script.
• Source: You can also build Zeppelin with all the latest changes from the GitHub repository (more on this later). To show you how to install and configure Zeppelin, we have downloaded the binary package from this site's mirror. Once you have downloaded it, unzip it somewhere on your machine. Suppose the path where you have unzipped the file is /home/Zeppelin/.