Configuring Hive

Hive is configured using an XML configuration file like Hadoop’s. The file is called hive-site.xml and is located in Hive’s conf directory. This file is where you can set properties that you want to set every time you run Hive. The same directory contains hive-default.xml, which documents the properties that Hive exposes and their default values.

You can override the configuration directory that Hive looks for in hive-site.xml by passing the --config option to the hive command:

% hive --config /Users/tom/dev/hive-conf

Note that this option specifies the containing directory, not hive-site.xml itself. It can be useful if you have multiple site files—for different clusters, say—that you switch between on a regular basis. Alternatively, you can set the HIVE_CONF_DIR environment variable to the configuration directory, for the same effect.