Setting up your development environment for JAVA with Maven — Mac Edition

3 min readMar 17, 2024

In this blog post, I will walk you through configuring your development machine for JAVA development using Apache Maven on macOS.

By the end of this guide, you will be able to start working on JAVA projects with Apache Maven on macOS.

If you are running Windows or Linux, please see the following posts regarding those Operating Systems:
Windows Edition
Linux Edition

Also see this article for the Hardware Requirements, and Prerequisites:
Setting up your development environment for JAVA with Maven

Software Installation

For macOS you have a few options to install IntelliJ. Installation file must be selected based on your processor (Intel or Apple Silicon).

To identify which option you have, please see this article from Apple:
https://support.apple.com/en-za/116943

Download the file from the website

Using HomeBrew:
Need HomeBrew: https://brew.sh/

Community Edition:
https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/intellij-idea#default

brew install --cask intellij-idea-ce

Ultimate Edition:
https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/intellij-idea#default

brew install --cask intellij-idea

For macOS you have a few options to install JAVA. Installation file must be selected based on your processor (Intel or Apple Silicon).

To identify which option you have, please see this article from Apple:
https://support.apple.com/en-za/116943

Download the file from the website

Open the installer file and the file will start to extract the required files onto the machine. Read the instructions and select Continue

Verify or Modify the installation path of JAVA and click Continue

Complete the Installation successfully. Click on Close

Ensure JAVA_HOME is set by running the following command in your terminal

echo %JAVA_HOME%

Download the binary zip archive from the publisher’s website
https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi

Switch to the Maven contents

mv Downloads/apache-maven* /opt/apache-maven

Add Maven binaries to the PATH and append

export PATH=/opt/apache-maven-3.9.6/bin:$PATH

To verify the Java JDK is properly installed, from your command line run the following command:

java -version

This command verifies the Java (java) is installed. If java is not found, check your Java installation.

To verify the Java JDK is properly installed, from your command line run the following command:

javac -version

This command verifies the Java complier (javac) is installed. If javac is not found, check your Java JDK installation.

Maven will not function without a properly installed.

To verify the Apache Maven is properly installed, from your command line run the following command:

mvn -v

or mvn -version

This command verifies Apache Maven is installed. If Maven is not found, check your Maven User Variables