PySpark isn't on sys.path by default, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as a regular library. You can address this by either symlinking pyspark into your site-packages, or adding pyspark to sys.path at runtime. findspark does the latter.

To initialize PySpark, just call

import findspark
findspark.init()

import pyspark
sc = pyspark.SparkContext(appName="myAppName")

Without any arguments, the SPARK_HOME environmental variable will be used, and if that isn't set, other possible install locations will be checked. If you've installed spark with

brew install apache-spark

on OS X, the location /usr/local/opt/apache-spark/libexec will be searched.

Alternatively, you can specify a location with the spark_home argument.

findspark.init('/path/to/spark_home')

To verify the automatically detected location, call

findspark.find()