Hadoop+HBase cluster on windows: winutils not found

Question

I'm trying to set up a fully-distributed 4-node dev cluster with Hadoop 2.20 and HBase 0.98 on Windows. I've built Hadoop on Windows successfully, and more recently, also build HBase on Windows.

We have successfully ran the wordcount example from the Hadoop installation guide, as well as a custom WebHDFS job. As HBase fully-distributed on Windows isn't supported yet, I'm running HBase under cygwin.

When trying to start hbase from my master (./bin/start-hbase.sh), I get the following error:

2014-04-17 16:22:08,599 ERROR [main] util.Shell: Failed to locate the winutils binary in the hadoop binary path
java.io.IOException: Could not locate executable null\bin\winutils.exe in the Hadoop binaries.
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.getQualifiedBinPath(Shell.java:278)
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.getWinUtilsPath(Shell.java:300)
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.<clinit>(Shell.java:293)
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.StringUtils.<clinit>(StringUtils.java:76)
    at org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration.getStrings(Configuration.java:1514)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.zookeeper.ZKConfig.makeZKProps(ZKConfig.java:113)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.zookeeper.ZKServerTool.main(ZKServerTool.java:46)

Looking at the Shell.java source, what is here set as null, seems to be the HADOOP_HOME environment variable. With hadoop under D:/hadoop, and HBase under cygwin root at C:/cygwin/root/usr/local/hbase, the cygwin $HADOOP_HOME variable is /cygdrive/d/hadoop/, and the Windows system environment variable %HADOOP_HOME% is D:\hadoop . Seems to me like with those two variables, the variable should be found correctly...

Also potentially relevant: I'm running Windows Server 2012 x64.

Edit: I have verified that there actually is a winutils.exe in D:\hadoop\bin\ .

Answer 1

We've found it. So, in Hadoop's Shell.java, you'll find that there are two options to communicate the Hadoop-path.

// first check the Dflag hadoop.home.dir with JVM scope
String home = System.getProperty("hadoop.home.dir");

// fall back to the system/user-global env variable
if (home == null) {
  home = System.getenv("HADOOP_HOME");
}

After trial and error, we found that in the HBase options (HBase's hbase-env.sh, HBASE_OPTS variable), you'll need to add in this option with the Windows(!) path to Hadoop. In our case, we needed to add -Dhadoop.home.dir=D:/hadoop .

Good luck to anyone else who happens to stumble across this ;).