Unable to launch Apache Flink 1.7 on Google Cloud Dataproc - hadoop

Question

I launched a Dataproc cluster with Hadoop 2.9.2, downloaded Flink 1.7.2 and tried launching it using the following command:
./bin/yarn-session.sh -n 2
This failed with the following error message:
Setting HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/etc/hadoop/conf because no HADOOP_CONF_DIR was set.
2019-02-15 12:56:05,679 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: jobmanager.rpc.address, localhost
2019-02-15 12:56:05,680 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: jobmanager.rpc.port, 6123
2019-02-15 12:56:05,681 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: jobmanager.heap.size, 1024m
2019-02-15 12:56:05,681 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: taskmanager.heap.size, 1024m
2019-02-15 12:56:05,681 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: taskmanager.numberOfTaskSlots, 1
2019-02-15 12:56:05,681 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: parallelism.default, 1
2019-02-15 12:56:05,682 INFO org.apache.flink.configuration.GlobalConfiguration - Loading configuration property: rest.port, 8081
2019-02-15 12:56:06,241 WARN org.apache.hadoop.util.NativeCodeLoader - Unable to load native-hadoop library for your platform... using builtin-java classes where applicable
2019-02-15 12:56:06,323 INFO org.apache.flink.runtime.security.modules.HadoopModule - Hadoop user set to robert (auth:SIMPLE)
2019-02-15 12:56:06,534 ERROR org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli - Error while running the Flink Yarn session.
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/ws/rs/ext/MessageBodyReader
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:763)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:468)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:74)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:369)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:363)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:362)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:349)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:763)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:468)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:74)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:369)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:363)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:362)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:349)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:763)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:468)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:74)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:369)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:363)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:362)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:349)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
at org.apache.hadoop.yarn.util.timeline.TimelineUtils.<clinit>(TimelineUtils.java:50)
at org.apache.hadoop.yarn.client.api.impl.YarnClientImpl.serviceInit(YarnClientImpl.java:179)
at org.apache.hadoop.service.AbstractService.init(AbstractService.java:163)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.getClusterDescriptor(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:984)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.createDescriptor(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:273)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.createClusterDescriptor(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:451)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.run(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:588)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.lambda$main$2(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:810)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at javax.security.auth.Subject.doAs(Subject.java:422)
at org.apache.hadoop.security.UserGroupInformation.doAs(UserGroupInformation.java:1836)
at org.apache.flink.runtime.security.HadoopSecurityContext.runSecured(HadoopSecurityContext.java:41)
at org.apache.flink.yarn.cli.FlinkYarnSessionCli.main(FlinkYarnSessionCli.java:810)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javax.ws.rs.ext.MessageBodyReader
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:382)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:349)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
... 49 more

Answer 1

Normally, the best way to install Flink would be to use the initialization action which installs via apt-get from Dataproc's distro to get the version of Flink that has been cross-compiled and tested against the given Dataproc version. In that case, you shouldn't need to modify any environment variables for it to work.
If you do want to use a specific version of Flink with a Dataproc version which doesn't provide that version of Flink in the distro, indeed you may need to install from a download of Flink like you have done. You can also look at one of the earlier versions of the initialization action when it installed Flink from a tarball to see the kinds of configuration that may have been necessary. For example, based on that earlier init action you may also want to export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/etc/hadoop/conf.

Answer 2

To solve this problem, I needed to export the following variable:
export HADOOP_CLASSPATH=`hadoop classpath`