Tiny guide to setup Java JDK in a Macbook M3

By sborrazas on 2024-04-25

I use fish shell and VSCodium (a fork of VS Code without telemetry).

  1. Install Homebrew https://brew.sh/
  2. Install fish with brew install fish
  3. This guide is for fish shell, so be sure to continue in fish shell by running fish. Optionally, you can set fish as your default shell on macOS
  4. Install openjdk with brew install openjdk
  5. After installing openjdk, I get the following caveat text from Homebrew (which you can read again by running brew info openjdk):
For the system Java wrappers to find this JDK, symlink it with
sudo ln -sfn /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

openjdk is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /opt/homebrew,
because macOS provides similar software and installing this software in
parallel can cause all kinds of trouble.

If you need to have openjdk first in your PATH, run:
fish_add_path /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/bin

For compilers to find openjdk you may need to set:
set -gx CPPFLAGS "-I/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/include"
  1. Run fish_add_path /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/bin to be able to run javac
  2. Run /usr/libexec/java_home -V to get the JAVA_HOME of the installed jdks. Mine returns:
Matching Java Virtual Machines (1):
    21.0.2 (arm64) "Homebrew" - "OpenJDK 21.0.2" /opt/homebrew/Cellar/openjdk/21.0.2/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/openjdk/21.0.2/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home
  1. To set JAVA_HOME environment variable, run set -Ux JAVA_HOME /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home. You can check this is a symlink to the installed jdk with ls -lart /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk
  2. Create a file called Hello.java with the following content:
public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
    }
}
  1. Run javac Hello.java which will create a file called Hellow.class. Then you can run java Hello to run your new class (beware this command takes the class name, not the filename). The output of the command is Hello, World!
  2. Now that you have the java development kit up and running in your computer, it’s time to get some IDE support to get auto-completion, auto-import, etc. You can choose between Eclipse, IntelliJ, VS Code, etc. In my personal computer I use VSCodium. Install VSCodium with brew install vscodium (or visual-studio-code if you prefer)
  3. You can open VSCodium from the terminal with codium .. Search for extensions in VSCodium and install Extension Pack for Java which installs several convenient extensions for working with Java. I started with Language Support for Java™ by Red Hat but it misses some functionality, so my recommendation is to go for the extension pack
  4. Congratulations! You got your Java development environment ready. You might want to install maven with brew install maven