How to connect Spark SQL to remote Hive metastore (via thrift protocol) with no hive-site.xml?

For Spark 1.x, you can set with :

System.setProperty("hive.metastore.uris", "thrift://METASTORE:9083");

final SparkConf conf = new SparkConf();
SparkContext sc = new SparkContext(conf);
HiveContext hiveContext = new HiveContext(sc);

Or

final SparkConf conf = new SparkConf();
SparkContext sc = new SparkContext(conf);
HiveContext hiveContext = new HiveContext(sc);
hiveContext.setConf("hive.metastore.uris", "thrift://METASTORE:9083");

Update If your Hive is Kerberized :

Try setting these before creating the HiveContext :

System.setProperty("hive.metastore.sasl.enabled", "true");
System.setProperty("hive.security.authorization.enabled", "false");
System.setProperty("hive.metastore.kerberos.principal", hivePrincipal);
System.setProperty("hive.metastore.execute.setugi", "true");

In spark 2.0.+ it should look something like that:

Don't forget to replace the "hive.metastore.uris" with yours. This assume that you have a hive metastore service started already (not a hiveserver).

 val spark = SparkSession
          .builder()
          .appName("interfacing spark sql to hive metastore without configuration file")
          .config("hive.metastore.uris", "thrift://localhost:9083") // replace with your hivemetastore service's thrift url
          .enableHiveSupport() // don't forget to enable hive support
          .getOrCreate()

        import spark.implicits._
        import spark.sql
        // create an arbitrary frame
        val frame = Seq(("one", 1), ("two", 2), ("three", 3)).toDF("word", "count")
        // see the frame created
        frame.show()
        /**
         * +-----+-----+
         * | word|count|
         * +-----+-----+
         * |  one|    1|
         * |  two|    2|
         * |three|    3|
         * +-----+-----+
         */
        // write the frame
        frame.write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("t4")

I too faced same problem, but resolved. Just follow this steps in Spark 2.0 Version

Step1: Copy hive-site.xml file from Hive conf folder to spark conf.

Step 2: edit spark-env.sh file and configure your mysql driver. (If you are using Mysql as a hive metastore.)

Or add MySQL drivers to Maven/SBT (If using those)

Step3: When you are creating spark session add enableHiveSupport()

val spark = SparkSession.builder.master("local").appName("testing").enableHiveSupport().getOrCreate()

Sample code:

package sparkSQL

/**
  * Created by venuk on 7/12/16.
  */

import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession

object hivetable {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val spark = SparkSession.builder.master("local[*]").appName("hivetable").enableHiveSupport().getOrCreate()

    spark.sql("create table hivetab (name string, age int, location string) row format delimited fields terminated by ',' stored as textfile")
    spark.sql("load data local inpath '/home/hadoop/Desktop/asl' into table hivetab").show()
    val x = spark.sql("select * from hivetab")
    x.write.saveAsTable("hivetab")
  }
}

Output: