Impala Interactive Shell

TL;DR

$ virtualenv ~/path/to/my_virtualenv   # <-- This is a path of your choosing.
$ source ~/path/to/my_virtualenv/bin/activate
(my_virtualenv) $ pip install git+git://github.mtv.cloudera.com/dknupp/impala-shell.git
(my_virtualenv) $ impala-shell -i my_impalad.foo.cloudera.com

System preparation

On barebones Redhat 7.3 and CentOS 6.8 systems:

sudo yum install yum-utils
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo yum install git
sudo yum install gcc-c++
sudo yum install python-devel
sudo yum install cyrus-sasl-devel.x86_64

On barebones Ubuntu 14.04 systems:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install gcc-c++
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install libsasl2-dev

On barebones OSX systems (this list maye be incomplete):

brew install git

To set up a virtualenv

$ virtualenv ~/path/to/my_virtualenv   # <-- This is a path of your choosing.

This will create a directory that holds the virtual environment, and will put a copy of the python executable there, with it's own isolated directory for additional python libs, and some utility scripts.

Activate the virtualenv by invoking

$ source ~/path/to/my_virtualenv/bin/activate

Your prompt will be by prepending the name of your virtualenv, so you can always tell which environment you're working in.

Installing from githhub

(If you decided NOT to create a virtualenv, and instead install into your system python environment, you'll probably have to sudo the following command.)

(my_virtualenv) $ pip install git+git://github.mtv.cloudera.com/dknupp/impala-shell.git

Launching the shell

At this point, you can launch impala-shell as always. If you don't have a real cluster, you can connect to the mini-cluster on your dev machine.

(my_virtualenv) $ impala-shell -i vc0728.halxg.cloudera.com
Starting Impala Shell without Kerberos authentication
Connected to vc0728.halxg.cloudera.com:21000
Server version: impalad version 2.9.0-SNAPSHOT RELEASE (build 2cd110014da78d3497529cdd32025b781935cc43)
***********************************************************************************
Welcome to the Impala shell.
(build version not available)

You can run a single query from the command line using the '-q' option.
***********************************************************************************
[vc0728.halxg.cloudera.com:21000] >

Note that if you install this on your dev machine (which why would you? since you ostensibly already have the Impala repo checked out -- but still) I don't know whether the impala-shell command installed by pip will interfere with impala-shell command that was installed when you last built Impala, so just a word of warning -- I didn't test this.

If you've done all this in a virtualenv, you can deactivate it by invoking:

$ deactivate