Local Spark

An MCP server that gives an agent a stateful local Spark session to work in — a Jupyter-notebook-shaped surface with the UI stripped away. The agent runs PySpark "cells" against a long-lived session (state persists across calls), runs SQL and gets rows back, and manages the runtime through tools.

The purpose is local exploration in service of authoring PySpark notebooks that will run on Microsoft Fabric: figure things out locally against the same OneLake Delta data, then hand the honed code to the user as a notebook to run on Fabric with a reasonably similar outcome — no cloud compute burned while exploring.

Status

Milestones A, B.1, B.2 complete and validated live. See CLAUDE.md for the architecture and the locked design decisions.

Running it (via uvx, from GitHub)

No clone or build needed — uvx installs and runs it in an ephemeral environment. Register it as an MCP server in Claude Code (.mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "local-spark": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/methodify/local-spark-mcp", "local-spark-mcp"],
      "env": { "LOCAL_SPARK_WORKSPACE_NAME": "Data Warehouse" }
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites on the host:

• Java 17 for Spark 3.5 (the server prefers a vfox-managed JDK 17, else JAVA_HOME; or set runtime.java_home / LOCAL_SPARK_JAVA_HOME). System Java 21 will not work.
• az login — OneLake/Fabric auth is ambient via DefaultAzureCredential.

The prebuilt OneLake token-provider jar ships inside the package, so Fabric mode works out of the box (no sbt needed). First run downloads PySpark/Delta jars and is slow; subsequent runs reuse the cached environment. Use --refresh to pick up a new commit: uvx --refresh --from git+https://github.com/methodify/local-spark-mcp local-spark-mcp.

Configuration

Configuration lives in a local-spark.toml file in the working directory (see local-spark.example.toml), discovered by walking up from where the server is launched. Environment variables (LOCAL_SPARK_*) override individual settings — convenient in the MCP env block above when you don't want a file. With no workspace configured the server runs local-only (no Fabric). Auth is ambient via az login, so nothing in the config is secret.