How to instruct Maven to use JDK other than the one specified at JAVA_HOME?

Question

Currently my JAVA_HOME is set to a JDK that is 1.4.2.

To run Maven 3, I would need 1.5 and above.

Is there any way to instruct my Maven install

Answer 1

That's pretty much the way to do it. I assume you mean you don't want to change your global JAVA_HOME. That's fine. You just need to set a different JAVA_HOME for Maven. You can easily do that by creating a file at /etc/mavenrc or ~/.mavenrc (Linux) or %HOME%\mavenrc_pre.bat (Windows) with the appropriate JAVA_HOME defined in it. Maven executes those on startup if they exist unless you've defined a variable named MAVEN_SKIP_RC. You could also modify the Maven startup scripts directly, but there's no good reason for that since it gives you these nice hooks.