Wim Deblauwe

Wim Deblauwe

Wim Deblauwe

Wim Deblauwe

Switching easily between Java JDKs on Mac OS X

Posted at — Mar 20, 2014

I just came upon a neat little trick to easily switch what JDK you are using on the command line on Mac OS X (10.9.2 is the version I am using), courtesy of this AskDifferent answer.

First, add the following aliases in ~/.profile file:

alias setJdk6='export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6)'
alias setJdk7='export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.7)'
alias setJdk8='export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8)'

Open a new terminal window or use source ~/.profile to load the aliases.

Now you can easily switch between the installed JDKs:

> setJdk6

We can verify that Maven picks this up correctly:

> mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 09:44:56+0100)
Maven home: /Applications/maven/apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.6.0_65, vendor: Apple Inc.
Java home: /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: MacRoman
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.9.2", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

To go to JDK 7:

> setJdk7

And Maven shows:

> mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 09:44:56+0100)
Maven home: /Applications/maven/apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.7.0_45, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.9.2", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

This works just as well to switch to the just released JDK 8:

> setJdk8

Maven output:

> mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 09:44:56+0100)
Maven home: /Applications/maven/apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.8.0, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.9.2", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

Voila, simpel and effective!

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