Make your libraries magically appear in Databricks.

When our team started setting up CI/CD for the various packages we maintain, we encountered some difficulties integrating Jenkins with Databricks.

We write a lot of Python + PySpark packages in our data science work, and we often deploy these as batch jobs run on a schedule using Databricks. However, each time we merged in a new change to one of these libraries we would have to manually create an egg, upload it using the Databricks GUI, go find all the jobs that used the library, and update each one to point to the new job. As our team and set of libraries and jobs grew, this became unsustainable (not to mention a big break from the CI/CD philosophy...).

As we set out to automate this using Databrick's library API, we realized that this task required using two versions of the API and many dependant API calls. Instead of trying to recreate that logic in each Jenkinsfile, we wrote apparate. Now you can enjoy the magic as well!

Apparate is a tool to manage libraries in Databricks in an automated fashion. It allows you to move away from the point-and-click interface for your development work and for deploying production-level libraries for use in scheduled Databricks jobs.

For a more detailed API and tutorials, check out the docs.

Note: apparate requires python3.

Apparate is hosted on PyPi, so to get the latest version simply install via pip:

pip install apparate

You can also install from source, by cloning the git repository https://github.com/ShopRunner/apparate.git and installing via easy_install:

git clone https://github.com/ShopRunner/apparate.git
cd apparate
easy_install .

Apparate uses a .apparatecfg to store information about your Databricks account and setup. To create this file, run:

apparate configure

You will be asked for your Databricks host name (the url you use to access the account - something like https://my-organization.cloud.databricks.com), an access token, and your production folder. This should be a folder your team creates to keep production-ready libraries. By isolating production-ready libraries in their own folder, you ensure that apparate will never update a job to use a library still in development/testing.

The API tokens can be generated in Databricks under Account Settings -> Access Tokens. To upload an egg to any folder in Databricks, you can use any token. To update jobs, you will need a token with admin permissions, which can be created in the same manner by an admin on the account.

While libraries can be uploaded to folders other than your specified production library, no libraries outside of this folder will ever be deleted and no jobs using libraries outside of this folder will be updated.

If you try to upload a library to Databricks that already exists there with the same version, a warning will be printed instructing the user to update the version if a change has been made. Without a version change the new library will not be uploaded.

NOTE: This package relies on the naming conventions used by setuptools - it will not work as intended if you rename the generated egg file before trying to upload it, and it will not work as intended if you rename the libraries in Databricks after uploading. All libraries in databricks should be named according to the <name>-<major_version>.<minor_version>.<patch_version> format. For example, apparate-1.0.0.

See a way for apparate to improve? We welcome contributions in the form of issues or pull requests!

Please check out the contributing page for more information.