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

On Windows:

STEP 1:

Find apache-maven-3.2.1\bin\mvn.bat, then find and replace JAVA_HOME to JAVA_HOME_MVN. Note: Before this, make a backup of mvn.bat

STEP 2:

Create a new environment variable called JAVA_HOME_MVN and point it to the bin of whichever jdk you want to use.

Answer 2

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.