# Introducing Hue Shell

The Hue Shell application provides access to the Pig and HBase command-line shells. The Shell application is designed to have the same look and feel as a Unix terminal. In addition to the shells configured by default, it is possible to include almost any process that exposes a command-line interface as an option in this Hue application.

## Contents

- Introducing Hue Shell
- Hue Shell Installation and Configuration

- Unix User Accounts

- Starting Hue Shell
- Viewing Documentation for the Shells

# Hue Shell Installation and Configuration

Hue Shell is one of the applications that is installed as part of Hue. For more information about installing Hue, see Hue Installation.

### Unix User Accounts

To properly isolate subprocesses so as to guarantee security, each Hue user who is using the Shell subprocess must have a Unix user account. The link between Hue users and Unix user accounts is the username, and so every Hue user who wants to use the Shell application must have a Unix user account with the same name on the sytem that runs the Hue Server. See the section on Unix user accounts in the Hue Shell configuration section of the Hue Installation Guide for instructions.

# Starting Hue Shell

1. To start the Hue Shell application, click the Shell icon ( ) in the navigation bar at the top of the Hue web page. (To start a second instance of the Shell application, right-click the link and select "Open link in new tab".)
   The Shell window opens in the Hue web page.
2. Click any of the tabs at the top of the Shell window to open a subprocess shell of that type.

   | Note: If a button is disabled, the program is not on the system path. Ask your Hue administrator to fix this problem.

3. After opening a subprocess, click anywhere in the body of the Shell application window to focus the command line. (Tab-completion is not supported.)
4. To end a process, type `exit` or `quit` depending on the type of subprocess you have opened.

   | Note: If you close your browser, the underlying shell process remains running for the amount of time specified by your Hue administrator. After this time the process is killed.

# Viewing Documentation for the Shells

For information about using each of the default shells, see the documentation on the following sites:

Shell | Site
--- | ---
Pig | Pig home page
HBase | HBase shell page