Setup JAVA_HOME, MAVEN_HOME, ANT_HOME in MacOSX Lion in 5 minutes

I have been getting the very same question all the time, from people trying to make it through the world of Java development on the Mac. One of the first things they have to tackle is setting up the appropriate tools and enviroment. Luckily enough MacOSX(Lion or previous flavors) have still lots of important tools for java development, integrated and ready to use.  The main 3 tools usually needed are the following.

• Java (of course) - it is not pre installed by default. All you need to do is open the Terminal.app and type something like java -version. Then a pop-up will appear asking you to install the latest available run time (at the time being is still  Java 6)
• Apache Ant - is already pre-installed! (1.8.2 at the time  being - Lion 10.7.1)
• Apache Maven - is already pre- installed. (3.0.3 at the time being - Lion 10.7.1)

So all the basic tools are there - all you need to do is set-up the enviroment by defining the HOME variables usually needed by other tools like IDE, app servers etc.

All you have to do is create a special file on  your home folder and use some basic script commands like export - to indicate the paths of the tools. Really easy.

1. Go to your home folder, that would be something like

 cd \Users\yourUserName

    In my system that would be

 cd \Users\papo

2. Create a new file using vi or vim (or whatever you like) with the following command

 vi .profile

3. Using (vim) in the file - just add the following lines

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant/
export MAVEN_HOME=/usr/share/maven/

4. Save the file (vi -> press Esc and :w) (see vi basic commands here)
5. Ready, open a new Terminal tab or window and test if your enviroment variables are all set by typiing

echo $JAVA_HOME 
echo $ANT_HOME
echo $MAVEN_HOME

This is it your enviroment variables are ready, MacOSX has already integrated Java, Ant and Maven executables to the system path.

Notes:
Some paths may change in the future - you can always check where each tool is pre-installed by using the 'which' and 'ls -al' command.

So if you are wondering where Ant has gone just type the following

which ant

Which is going to return something like /usr/bin/ant

Then just use the path above and use ls to see the real path of the symbolic link

 ls -al /usr/bin/ant

This is going to return something like 22 Jul 30 19:38 /usr/bin/ant  /usr/share/ant/bin/ant


Hope that helps! Enjoy!