How to do it...

To configure your session, in a Spark version which is lower that version 2.0, you would normally have to create a SparkConf object, set all your options to the right values, and then build the SparkContext ( SqlContext if you wanted to use DataFrames, and HiveContext if you wanted access to Hive tables). Starting from Spark 2.0, you just need to create a SparkSession, just like in the following snippet:

spark = SparkSession.builder \
    .master("local[2]") \
    .appName("Your-app-name") \
    .config("spark.some.config.option", "some-value") \
    .getOrCreate()