Loading Spark Config for testing Spark Applications

I've been trying to test a spark application on my local laptop before deploying it to a cluster (to avoid having to package and deploy my entire application every time) but struggling on loading the spark config file.

When I run my application on a cluster, I am usually providing a spark config file to the application (using spark-submit's --conf). This file has a lot of config options because this application interacts with Cassandra and HDFS. However, when I try to do the same on my local laptop, I'm not sure exactly how to load this config file. I know I can probably write a piece of code that takes the file path of the config file and just goes through and parses all the values and sets them in the config, but I'm just wondering if there are easier ways.

Current status:

• I placed the desired config file in the my SPARK_HOME/conf directory and called it spark-defaults.conf ---> This didn't get applied, however this exact same file runs fine using spark-submit
• For local mode, when I create the spark session, I'm setting Spark Master as "local[2]". I'm doing this when creating the spark session, so I'm wondering if it's possible to create this session with a specified config file.