Maven: install on mac. Tutorial for brew and the official method.

Updated:

Marco Molteni

You received your new Apple machine and don't remember how to install Maven? Look no further. In this tutorial, we will describe how to install Maven using Homebrew on macOS.
For Windows and Ubuntu users, alternative methods for installation will also be discussed.

Install maven using Homebrew

Homebrew is de facto the package manager for macOS. If you cannot use brew you can look at the alternative installation procedures described in the post.

Here are the few steps required:

Install Homebrew if it is not present yet

Verify that brew is installed in your system.

brew --version

If Homebrew is installed, this command will display the version number of Homebrew. If Homebrew is not installed, you will see an error message indicating that the command was not found.

Alternatively, you can also check if Homebrew is installed by running the following command:

which brew

This command will display the location of the Homebrew executable file if it is installed. If Homebrew is not installed, you will see an error message indicating that the command was not found.

If the command is not found you can install it with the official script from https://brew.sh:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install maven

If brew is installed in your terminal you can simply execute:

brew maven

Maven will be installed by brew.

Verify your maven installation

When brew confirm the installation you can verify if maven is working correctly.

% mvn -version 
Apache Maven 3.8.4 (9b656c72d54e5bacbed989b64718c159fe39b537) 
Maven home: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/maven/3.8.4/libexec 
Java version: 17.0.1, vendor: Homebrew, runtime: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/openjdk/17.0.1/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home

In the video we describe how to install Maven using Homebrew. In the post you can find alternative methods.

Alternative methods

If you can't or you don't want to use brew.sh for the installation of Maven we describe here alternatives methods.

Official method

The official maven installation instructions are the following:

Have a JDK installation on your system. Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable pointing to your JDK installation or have the java executable on your PATH.
Extract the archive in any directory. The archive can be found here: https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi
unzip apache-maven-{version}-bin.zip or tar xzvf apache-maven-{version}-bin.tar.gz
Add the bin directory of the created directory apache-maven-{version} to the PATH environment variable

SDKMan

If you are using SDKMan for your Java frameworks you can install maven simply with:

$ sdk install maven

You can find more examples about SDKMan in this blog Java Angular Setup

Installation on Windows

To install Maven on Windows, you can follow the official installation instructions provided by the Apache Maven project:

Download the Maven binary archive from https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi
Extract the archive to the directory where you want Maven installed.
Add the bin directory of the extracted Maven directory to the PATH environment variable.
Verify the installation by opening a new command prompt and running the following command:

mvn -version

As an alternative you can use sdkman.io like for MacOs:

Install sdkman

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash

Restart your Command Prompt to activate SDKMAN.
Run the following command to install Maven:

Installation on Ubuntu

Open Terminal on your machine
Run the following command in the Terminal:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install maven

The apt package manager will handle the installation process for you.

Once the installation is complete, verify the installation by running the following command:

mvn -version

Updating an Existing Maven Installation

Updating Maven on Mac using Homebrew

Open Terminal.
Run the following command to update Maven:

brew upgrade maven

Updating Maven Installation on Ubuntu

To update your Maven installation on Ubuntu, you can use the apt-get package manager to upgrade it.

Here are the steps:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade maven

This will upgrade your Maven installation to the latest version available in the Ubuntu repository.