Install Hadoop 2.2 or newer on Windows

Hadoop version 2.2 onwards includes native support for Windows. The official Apache Hadoop releases do not include Windows binaries (yet, as of January 2014). However building a Windows package from the sources is fairly straightforward.

Hadoop is a complex system with many components. Some familiarity at a high level is helpful before attempting to build or install it or the first time. Familiarity with Java is necessary in case you need to troubleshoot.

The Hadoop developers have used Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 during development and testing. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are also likely to work because of the Win32 API similarities with the respective server SKUs. We have not tested on Windows XP or any earlier versions of Windows and these are not likely to work. Any issues reported on Windows XP or earlier will be closed as Invalid.

Do not attempt to run the installation from within Cygwin. Cygwin is neither required nor supported

.Oracle JDK versions 1.7 and 1.6 have been tested by the Hadoop developers and are known to work.

Make sure that JAVA_HOME is set in your environment and does not contain any spaces. If your default Java installation directory has spaces then you must use the Windows 8.3 Pathname instead e.g. c:\Progra~1\Java\... instead of c:\Program Files\Java\....