Importing spark.implicits._ in scala

You can do something similar to what is done in the Spark testing suites. For example this would work (inspired by SQLTestData):

class SomeSpec extends FlatSpec with BeforeAndAfter { self =>

  var spark: SparkSession = _

  private object testImplicits extends SQLImplicits {
    protected override def _sqlContext: SQLContext = self.spark.sqlContext
  }
  import testImplicits._

  before {
    spark = SparkSession.builder().master("local").getOrCreate()
  }

  "a test" should "run" in {
    // implicits are working
    val df = spark.sparkContext.parallelize(List(1,2,3)).toDF()
  }
}

Alternatively you may use something like SharedSQLContext directly, which provides a testImplicits: SQLImplicits, i.e.:

class SomeSpec extends FlatSpec with SharedSQLContext {
  import testImplicits._

  // ...

}