---
# System prepended metadata

title: Pig File/Archive post-mortem

---

Pig File/Archive post-mortem
===

On 18-19.06.2019 me (Szymon) and Tomek we were working on [adding file/archive support to the Shell mapper](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/oozie-to-airflow/issues/50).
It was supposed to be a simple task, however it turned out to be anything but.

### Approach 1

First of all, the way we run a shell command is using the `gcloud dataproc jobs submit pig ... --execute ...` command.

We looked at the [API](https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/dataproc/jobs/submit/pig#--properties) and found the following flag:

`--properties=[PROPERTY=VALUE,…]`
A list of key value pairs to configure Pig.

Using it we tried setting the appropriate configuration properties to pass the files / archives, based on [this SO answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/4966099/1972469).
The result was something like:
```
gcloud dataproc jobs submit pig --cluster=oozie-o2a-2cpu \
--region=europe-west3 \
--properties "mapred.cache.file=/user/szymon/examples/apps/demo/workflow.xml#myxml.xml,mapred.create.symlink=yes" \
--execute "sh cat myxml.xml"
```

Unfortunately, it didn't work. The file `myxml.xml` was not present in the working directory of the job and the `cat` command was failing.

### Approach 2

Knowing that we have a Pig mapper which produces a DAG with a `DataprocPigOperator` task running a Pig script and it already handles file/archive, we tried to explore this path.

We found that a `.pig` script can successfully run a bash command, e.g.:

*script.pig*
```
sh ls -al
```

The file/archive functionality in a Pig script is handled by modifying the script and adding a few `SET` commands on top, e.g.:
```
set mapred.create.symlink yes;
set mapred.cache.file hdfs:///user/szymon/examples/apps/pig/test_dir/test.txt#test_link.txt,hdfs:///user/szymon/examples/apps/pig/test_dir/test2.zip#test_link.zip;
set mapred.cache.archives hdfs:///user/szymon/examples/apps/pig/test_dir/test2.zip#test_zip_dir,hdfs:///user/szymon/examples/apps/pig/test_dir/test3.zip#test3_zip_dir,hdfs:///user/szymon/examples/apps/pig/test_dir/testcopy.zip#testcopy_zip_dir;
```

We ran this on Dataproc and there are a few observations:
* When the HDFS URI points to a non-existent `archive`, there is an error and the job fails
* When the HDFS URI points to a non-existent `file`, no error is thrown and the job completes
* If we try to `sh cat ...` the referenced `file` or a file from a referenced `archive` (which should be unarchived and present), there is an error - file not found
* A `sh ls -al` only showed the `script.pig` file

### Additional actions

When printing `sh pwd` we found out that the job is actually executed from a `/tmp/{job-hash}` directory.

It is removed after the job has completed so unable to be inspected. We placed an `sh sleep 1000` inside the Pig script to inspect the directory at runtime but didn't find the file/archive resources inside.

### Conclusions

We didn't manage to find a way to add file/archive functionality to the Shell mapper.

Moreover, it seems that it doesn't work correctly for the Pig mapper either.

We've decided to abandon this problem for now and return to it later.
Things to resolve:
* Find out where exactly the file/archive resources should be store in the local cache (local filesystem)
* Find out if they are stored there in the case of the `gcloud dataproc jobs submit pig` command as well as the `DataprocPigOperator` (which probably uses the same command underneath)
* Check (somehow) if for Pig the file/archive functionality works at all - possibly by creating a Pig script which makes use of the symlinked file from the local cache