If you are running on a Redhat-based system, you can easily download our software using yum. You can also just download the RPMs directly from

After you’ve set up the Cloudera rpm repository, you can install the hadoop-0.20-conf-pseudo-desktop package to automatically set up Desktop on a new pseudo-distributed Hadoop cluster:

# yum install hadoop-0.20-conf-pseudo-desktop

On 64-bit machines, please run:

# yum install hadoop-0.20-conf-pseudo-desktop cloudera-desktop.x86_64

If you are running on a Debian-based platform, you can download our packages using apt.

deb http://desktop:tabletop@archive.cloudera.com/desktop-0.4/debian DISTRO-testing contrib
deb-src http://desktop:tabletop@archive.cloudera.com/desktop-0.4/debian DISTRO-testing contrib

# curl -s http://archive.cloudera.com/debian/archive.key | apt-key add -

This allows you to verify that you are downloading genuine packages.

# apt-get update

# apt-get install hadoop-0.20-conf-pseudo-desktop

At this point, you should have Hadoop installed and configured for pseudo-distributed operation. To start your cluster, run the following commands:

# /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-namenode start
# /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-datanode start
# /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-secondarynamenode start
# /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-jobtracker start
# /etc/init.d/hadoop-0.20-tasktracker start

To verify that your cluster is running, visit http://localhost:50030/ in your web browser. You should see the Hadoop JobTracker Web Interface. To verify that the namenode is running, visit http://localhost:50070/.

Additionally, you can now run a simple example job to verify that your cluster can execute MapReduce jobs:

$ hadoop-0.20 jar /usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/hadoop*examples*jar pi 2 10000

After a minute or so, this example job should print out a very rough approximation of the value of Pi.

Finally, start up the Cloudera Desktop server:

# /etc/init.d/cloudera-desktop start

Cloudera Desktop should have started at http://localhost:8088/.

At this point, skip ahead to Using Cloudera Desktop.

Cloudera Desktop requires an installation of the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop (version 2). See link:http://archive.cloudera.com/ for instructions.

To use Cloudera Desktop, you must be running Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop with a version number of at least 0.20.1+133. If you are not running at least this version of Hadoop, please upgrade your cluster before proceeding.

Cloudera Desktop consists of a web service that runs on a special node in your cluster. You should pick one node to run Cloudera Desktop. From this point on, we’ll refer to that node as the "Cloudera Desktop Server". This should be one of the nodes within your cluster for optimal performance, though it can be a remote node as long as there are no overly restrictive firewalls.

For small clusters of less than 10 nodes, it is fine to choose your existing master node as the Cloudera Desktop Server.

You can install Cloudera Desktop via package repositories (yum or apt) or by using a tarball.

# yum search hadoop
# yum install cloudera-desktop

# yum install cloudera-desktop

# yum install cloudera-desktop.x86_64

# yum install cloudera-desktop-plugins

deb http://desktop:tabletop@archive.cloudera.com/desktop-0.4/debian DISTRO-testing contrib
deb-src http://desktop:tabletop@archive.cloudera.com/desktop-0.4/debian DISTRO-testing contrib

# curl -s http://archive.cloudera.com/debian/archive.key | apt-key add -

# apt-get update

# apt-cache search cloudera-desktop

# apt-get install cloudera-desktop

# apt-get install cloudera-desktop-plugins

3.2.3. Installing Cloudera Desktop via the tarball

You can also install Cloudera Desktop via a tarball.

3.2.3.1. Installing Dependencies

Cloudera Desktop employs some Python modules which use native code and depend on certain development libraries being on your system. To install from the tarball you must have the following installed:

Table 1. Required Dependencies

Redhat	Debian
libxslt-devel	libxslt-dev
libxml2-devel	libxml2-dev
sqlite-devel	libsqlite3-dev
python-devel	python2.4-dev(orpython2.5-dev)
gcc	gcc
python-setuptools	python-setuptools

Additionally, you must have Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop installed and available. Specifically, your Hadoop version must be at least 0.20.1+133. If you have a previous release, upgrade Hadoop before continuing with Cloudera Desktop.

3.2.3.2. Build

With $HADOOP_HOME and $PREFIX configured to the path of your Hadoop installation and the path where you’d like to install Cloudera Desktop, respectively, run:

$ HADOOP_HOME=/path/to/hadoop-0.20.1+152 PREFIX=/path/to/install/into make desktop install

You may install Cloudera Desktop anywhere on your system - it does not need root access. We recommend that you create a new user for Cloudera Desktop and either install in that user’s home directory or in a directory within /usr/local.

3.2.3.3. Install Hadoop Plugins

In order to communicate with Hadoop, Cloudera Desktop requires that you install and configure a plugin JAR. This jar is libs/hadoop/java-lib/cloudera-desktop-plugins-0.4.1.jar.

Symlink this jar into your Hadoop lib directory (/usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/lib if you’ve installed CDH via a Debian or RPM package):

$ cd /usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/lib
$ ln -s /usr/local/cloudera-desktop/libs/hadoop/java-lib/cloudera*jar
# Restart Hadoop

	On a multi-node cluster, you will need to install the plug-ins on every node. You do not need to install the entirety of Cloudera Desktop everywhere, but the plug-in jars need to be available on every machine.

3.2.3.4. Restart Hadoop

Once you have made these changes in your Hadoop configuration, go ahead and restart your Hadoop daemons.

3.2.3.5. Running Cloudera Desktop

To start Cloudera Desktop, you’ll use env/bin/supervisor. This will start several subprocesses, corresponding to different bits of Cloudera Desktop.

3.2.3.6. FAQ about Tarball Installation

I moved my Cloudera Desktop installation from one directory to another and it no longer. functions correctly.

Due to the use of absolute paths by some python packages, you’ll have to run a series of commands if you relocate your Cloudera Desktop installation. From within the new location, run:

$ make desktop

This should solve the problem.

Why does "make install" compile all of these other pieces of software? In order to ensure that Cloudera Desktop is stable on a variety of distributions and architectures, it installs a Python "virtual environment" which includes its dependencies. This ensures that the software can depend against specific versions of various Python libraries and not have to worry about what might or might not be installed already on your particular system.

Cloudera Desktop requires that you install and configure some plugins in your Hadoop installation.

When you installed the cloudera-desktop-plugins package above, your package manager automatically added the required plugin jar to your Hadoop installation’s lib directory, making them available to Hadoop. In order to enable the plugins, you’ll need to make some small additions to your configuration.

These configuration changes should be made on each node in your cluster by editing the files in /etc/hadoop-0.20/conf/

<property>
  <name>dfs.namenode.plugins</name>
  <value>org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.NamenodePlugin</value>
  <description>Comma-separated list of namenode plug-ins to be activated.
  </description>
</property>
<property>
  <name>dfs.datanode.plugins</name>
  <value>org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.DatanodePlugin</value>
  <description>Comma-separated list of datanode plug-ins to be activated.
  </description>
</property>
<property>
  <name>dfs.thrift.address</name>
  <value>0.0.0.0:9090</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>jobtracker.thrift.address</name>
  <value>0.0.0.0:9290</value>
</property>
<property>
  <name>mapred.jobtracker.plugins</name>
  <value>org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.ThriftJobTrackerPlugin</value>
  <description>Comma-separated list of jobtracker plug-ins to be activated.
  </description>
</property>

# Exposes /metrics URL endpoint for metrics information.
dfs.class=org.apache.hadoop.metrics.spi.NoEmitMetricsContext
mapred.class=org.apache.hadoop.metrics.spi.NoEmitMetricsContext
jvm.class=org.apache.hadoop.metrics.spi.NoEmitMetricsContext
rpc.class=org.apache.hadoop.metrics.spi.NoEmitMetricsContext

At this point you should restart all of the daemons in your cluster so that the plugins can be loaded.

You can confirm that the plugins are running correctly by tailing the daemon logs:

$ tail --lines=500 /var/log/hadoop-0.20/hadoop*namenode*.log | grep ThriftPlugin
2009-09-28 16:30:44,337 INFO org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.ThriftPluginServer: Starting Thrift server
2009-09-28 16:30:44,419 INFO org.apache.hadoop.thriftfs.ThriftPluginServer: Thrift server listening on 0.0.0.0:9090

	Configuring Your Firewall for Cloudera Desktop
	Cloudera Desktop currently requires that the machines within your cluster can speak to each other freely over TCP. The machines outside your cluster only need to be able to open TCP port 8088 on the Cloudera Desktop Server to interact with the system.

Cloudera Desktop uses the CherryPy web server. You can change the IP address and port the web server listens on, which is port 8088 on all configured IP addresses. (Use http_host and http_port.)

By default, the first user who logins to Cloudera Desktop may choose any username and password, and becomes an administrator automatically. This user may create other user and administrator accounts. User information is stored in the Django backend, in the Django database.

To use PAM authentication, follow the instructions under the [[auth]] section of the file. Note that under PAM authentication mode, the User Manager application does not update your system accounts.

	Password Security and PAM Authentication
	Cloudera Desktop does not ship with SSL enabled by default. If you choose to enable PAM authentication, be aware that HTTP is not an encrypted protocol and users' authentication details may be revealed over the network.

You can configure Cloudera Desktop to serve over HTTPS. To do so, you’ll need to install "pyOpenSSL" within Desktop’s context and configure your keys.

To install pyOpenSSL, from the root of your Desktop installation (/usr/share/cloudera-desktop if you installed from packages, type) execute:

$ ./env/bin/easy_install pyOpenSSL

Then, configure Cloudera Desktop to use your private key by putting the following inside your /etc/cloudera-desktop/cloudera-desktop.ini:

ssl_certificate=/path/to/certificate
ssl_private_key=/path/to/key

Ideally, you would have an appropriate key signed by a Certificate Authority. If you’re just testing, you can create a self-signed key using the openssl command, that may be installed on your system:

# Create a key
$ openssl genrsa 1024 > host.key
# Create a self-signed certificate
$ openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -key host.key > host.cert

If your Hadoop cluster is made up of multiple nodes, you should configure Cloudera Desktop to point to the external hostnames of your Namenode and JobTracker. To do so, simply change the namenode_host and jobtracker_host lines in the configuration file. The inline comments in the existing file will guide you.

The Cloudera Desktop logs are found in /var/log/cloudera-desktop if you have installed via your package manager, or /path/to/cloudera-desktop/logs if you’ve installed via a tarball. Inside the log directory you will find stderr and stdout logs for each of the processes described above.

If users on your cluster experience issues, you can often find error messages in these log files.

If you are unable to start Cloudera Desktop from the init script, the supervisor.stderr log file can often contain clues.

The cpserver.stderr log file provides an access log for all requests against the Desktop web server.

We recommend that production installations configure log rotation software like logrotate to periodically rotate and archive these logs.

Cloudera Desktop requires a SQL database to store small amounts of data, including user account information as well as history of job submissions and Hive queries. By default, Desktop is configured to use the embedded database SQLite for this purpose, and should require no configuration or management by the administrator.

# sqlite3 /usr/share/cloudera-desktop/desktop/desktop.db
SQLite version 3.3.6
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite> select username from auth_user;
admin
test
sample
sqlite>

mysql> create database desktop_example;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> grant all on desktop_example.* to 'desktop_user'@'localhost' identified by 'secretpassword';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

[[database]]
host=localhost
port=3306
engine=django.db.backends.mysql
user=desktop_user
password=secretpassword
name=desktop_example

# su - cdesktop -s /bin/bash
$ /usr/share/cloudera-desktop/env/bin/easy_install MySQL-python

$ /usr/share/cloudera-desktop/env/bin/desktop syncdb --noinput

Cloudera Desktop is primarily tested on Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6, on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Google Chrome and Safari work as well. Support for Internet Explorer is forthcoming.

Cloudera Desktop 0.4.1 is currently in private beta. We’re excited to receive your feedback and criticisms. We expect that you may uncover some bugs and mishaps. The best way to send feedback is to send us e-mail, at desktop-feedback@cloudera.com.

If you find that something doesn’t work, it’ll often be helpful to include logs from your server. These are available at the /logs URL on Desktop’s webserver (not part of the graphical Desktop UI). Please download the logs as a zip (or cut and paste the ones that look relevant) and send those with your bug reports.