I pulled the latest source from the Spark repository and built locally. It works great from an interactive shell like spark-shell or spark-sql.
Now I want to connect Zeppelin to my Spark 1.5, according to this install manual. I published the custom Spark build to the local maven repository and set the custom Spark version in the Zeppelin build command. The build process finished successfully but when I try to run basic things like sc inside notebook, it throws:
akka.ConfigurationException: Akka JAR version [2.3.11] does not match the provided config version [2.3.4]
Version 2.3.4 is set in pom.xml and spark/pom.xml, but simply changing them won’t even let me get a build.
If I rebuild Zeppelin with the standard -Dspark.vesion=1.4.1, everything works.
Update 2016-01
Spark 1.6 support has landed to master and is available under -Pspark-1.6 profile.
Update 2015-09
Spark 1.5 support has landed to master and is available under -Pspark-1.5 profile.
Work on supporting Spark 1.5 in Apache Zeppelin (incubating) was done under this PR apache/incubator-zeppelin#269 which will lend to master soon.
For now, building from Spark_1.5 branch with -Pspark-1.5 should do the trick.