Trying to use SparkSQL to read a JSON file, from either pyspark or spark-shell, I got this error: java.io.IOException: No input paths specified in job scala> sqlContext.read.json("/u02/custom/twitter/twitter.json") java.io.IOException: No input paths specified in job at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.FileInputFormat.listStatus(FileInputFormat.java:202) Despite the reference articles that I found using this local path syntax (/u02/custom/twitter/twitter.json), it turned out that I needed to prefix it with file://: scala> sqlContext.read.json("file:///u02/custom/twitter/twitter.json") res3: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [@timestamp: string, @version: string, contributors: string, coordinates: string, created_at: string, entities: struct<hashtags:array<struct<indices:array<bigint>,text:string>>,media:array<struct<display_url:string,expanded_url:string,id:bigint,id_str:string,indices:array<bigint>,media_url:string,media_url_https:string,sizes:struct<large:struct<h:bigint,resize:string,w:bigint>,medium:struct<h:bigint,resize:string,w:bigint>,small:struct<h:bigint,resize:string,w:bigint>,thumb:struct<h:bigint,resize:string,w:bigint>>,source_status_id:bigint,source_status_id_str:string,source_user_id:bigint,source_user_id_str:string,type:string,url:string>>,symbols:array<struct<indices:array<bigint>,text:string>>,urls:array<struct<display_url:string,expanded_url:string.