Spark env - executor cores

[renderit]

Hi, I'm using findspark on jupyter with spark 2.1.0, which works great. However, I am trying to increase the number of executor cores in standalone mode. I thought by default it uses all cores on my OSX(8 cores), but its only using 1. Currently tried:

spark = (SparkSession.builder\
                    .master("local[*]")\
                    .config("spark.sql.warehouse.dir", "target/spark-warehouse")\
                    .appName("Ad analysis")\
                    .enableHiveSupport()\
                    .getOrCreate())

spark.sparkContext.defaultParallelism <-- returns 1

Secondly, how do I provide a conf file when running such interactive shell with findspark