How to run WordCountTopology from storm-starter in Intellij
Unfortunately, AFAIK you can't run multilang feature with LocalCluster without having packaged file.
ShellProcess relies on codeDir of TopologyContext, which is used by supervisor. Workers are serialized to stormcode.ser, but multilang files should extracted to outside of serialized file so that python/ruby/node/etc can load it.
Accomplishing this with distribute mode is easy because there's always user submitted jar, and supervisor can know it is what user submitted.
But accomplishing this with local mode is not easy cause supervisor cannot know user submitted jar, and users can run topology to local mode without packaging.
So, Supervisor in local mode finds resource directory ("resources") from each jars (which ends with "jar") in classpath, and copy first occurrence to codeDir.
storm jar
places user topology jar to the first of classpath, so it can be run without issue.
So normally, it's natural for ShellProcess to not find "splitsentence.py". Maybe your working directory or PYTHONPATH did the trick.