Error while running Hive Action in Oozie

Question

I'm trying to run a hive action through Oozie. My workflow.xml is as follows:

<workflow-app name='edu-apollogrp-dfe' xmlns="uri:oozie:workflow:0.1">
    <start to="HiveEvent"/>
    <action name="HiveEvent">
            <hive xmlns="uri:oozie:hive-action:0.2">
                    <job-tracker>${jobTracker}</job-tracker>
                    <name-node>${nameNode}</name-node>
                    <configuration>
                            <property>
                                    <name>oozie.hive.defaults</name>
                                    <value>${hiveConfigDefaultXml}</value>
                            </property>
                    </configuration>
                    <script>${hiveQuery}</script>
                    <param>OUTPUT=${StagingDir}</param>
            </hive>

            <ok to="end"/>
            <error to="end"/>
    </action>

    <kill name='kill'>
                    <message>Hive failed, error message[${wf:errorMessage(wf:lastErrorNode())}]</message>
    </kill>
    <end name='end'/>

And here is my job.properties file:

oozie.wf.application.path=${nameNode}/user/${user.name}/hiveQuery
oozie.libpath=${nameNode}/user/${user.name}/hiveQuery/lib
queueName=interactive

#QA
nameNode=hdfs://hdfs.bravo.hadoop.apollogrp.edu
jobTracker=mapred.bravo.hadoop.apollogrp.edu:8021

# Hive

hiveConfigDefaultXml=/etc/hive/conf/hive-default.xml

hiveQuery=hiveQuery.hql
StagingDir=${nameNode}/user/${user.name}/hiveQuery/Output

When I run this workflow, I end up with this error:

ACTION[0126944-130726213131121-oozie-oozi-W@HiveEvent] Launcher exception: org/apache/hadoop/hive/cli/CliDriver
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/hadoop/hive/cli/CliDriver

Error Code: JA018

Error Message: org/apache/hadoop/hive/cli/CliDriver

I'm not sure what this error means. Where am I going wrong?

EDIT

This link says error code JA018 is: JA018 is output directory exists error in workflow map-reduce action. But in my case the output directory does not exist. This makes it all the more confusing

Solution

I figured out what was going wrong!

The class org/apache/hadoop/hive/cli/CliDriver is required for execution of a Hive Action. This much is obvious from the error message. This class is within this jar file: hive-cli-0.7.1-cdh3u5.jar. (In my case cdh3u5 in my cloudera version).

Oozie checks for this jar in the ShareLib directory. The location of this directory is usually configured in hive-site.xml, with the property name as oozie.service.WorkflowAppService.system.libpath, so Oozie should find the jar easily.

But in my case, hive-site.xml did not include this property, so Oozie didn't know where to look for this jar, hence the java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError.

To resolve this, I had to include a parameter in my job.properties file to point oozie to the location of the ShareLib directory, as follows: oozie.libpath=${nameNode}/user/oozie/share/lib. (depends on where SharedLib directory is configured on your cluster).

This got rid of the error!