Setting JAVA_HOME on Mac OS X 10.5

I have been playing around with a lot of Java tools these days! I was trying out XPlanner and when I ran the startup shell script, it spit out the infamous error!

The JAVA_HOME environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program
NB: JAVA_HOME should point to a JDK not a JRE

I tried a couple of things, but they did not work. A bit of Google, and found an easy way.

Here are the steps!

• Open Terminal.
• First confirm you have JDK by typing “which java”. It should show something like /usr/bin/java.
• Check you have the needed version of Java, by typing “java -version”. My setup shows java version “1.5.0_13″
• JAVA_HOME is essentially the full path of the directory that contains a sub-directory named bin which in turn contains the java.
• For Mac OSX - it is /Library/Java/Home (There are other directories too, but this is the simplest!)
• Set JAVA_HOME using this command in Terminal: export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
• echo $JAVA_HOME on Terminal to confirm the path
• You should now be able to run your application

This sets JAVA_HOME only for this session. If you want it to persist, you will have to add the command to your ~/.profile file.

For more details on this, refer to Sean Brown’s blog post.