diff --git a/docs/spark-standalone.md b/docs/spark-standalone.md
index 29b5491861bf3..a17937d0bc195 100644
--- a/docs/spark-standalone.md
+++ b/docs/spark-standalone.md
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ Finally, the following configuration options can be passed to the master and wor
 
 # Cluster Launch Scripts
 
-To launch a Spark standalone cluster with the launch scripts, you need to create a file called `conf/slaves` in your Spark directory, which should contain the hostnames of all the machines where you would like to start Spark workers, one per line. The master machine must be able to access each of the slave machines via password-less `ssh` (using a private key). For testing, you can just put `localhost` in this file.
+To launch a Spark standalone cluster with the launch scripts, you need to create a file called `conf/slaves` in your Spark directory, which should contain the hostnames of all the machines where you would like to start Spark workers, one per line. If conf/slaves does not exist, the launch scripts use a list which contains single hostname `localhost`. This can be used for testing. The master machine must be able to access each of the slave machines via password-less `ssh` (using a private key).
 
 Once you've set up this file, you can launch or stop your cluster with the following shell scripts, based on Hadoop's deploy scripts, and available in `SPARK_HOME/bin`: