topic Re: Compute kind SERVERLESS_REPL_VM is not allowed to use cluster scoped libraries. in Data Engineering

Compute kind SERVERLESS_REPL_VM is not allowed to use cluster scoped libraries.

ManojkMohan — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:46:11 GMT

i have a s3 uri 's3://salesforcedatabricksorders/orders_data.xlsx' , i have created a connector between data bricks and salesfoce, i am first gettig the orders_data.xlsx to databricks layer perform basic transformation on it and then send it to salesforce data cloud

Following the below steps but getting the error int he screen shot , i am using databricks free version

Navigate to your cluster's configuration page in the Databricks UI.
Go to the Libraries tab.
Click Install New.
Select Maven as the source.
In the Coordinates box, enter: com.crealytics:spark-excel_2.12:3.5.0
Click Install. The cluster will restart with the new library. @szymon_dybczak have you come across this before ?

Re: Compute kind SERVERLESS_REPL_VM is not allowed to use cluster scoped libraries.

szymon_dybczak — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:53:15 GMT

Hi @ManojkMohan ,

This is a well known limitation of serverless compute. Moreover, serverless doesn't support installing libraries at cluster scope. Only notebook scoped libraries are supported.

In your case, as a workaround you can try to use pandas to read excel

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/compute/serverless/limitations

Re: Compute kind SERVERLESS_REPL_VM is not allowed to use cluster scoped libraries.

kerem — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:54:55 GMT

Hello,

I’ve come across the same issue reading an Excel file into a PySpark dataframe via Serverless compute.
As the error states with Serverless, you cannot install a cluster scoped library so you have to use notebook scoped libraries (%pip install…). Unfortunately that doesn’t apply to Maven libraries which is annoying.

As a workaround you can use Pandas to read the Excel file first and read it into a PySpark Dataframe.

Kerem Durak