Install Maven on Mac OSX

December 21st, 2017

First of all lets check for Maven in your system, because some versions of OS X came with Apache Maven 3 built in installed.

$ mvn -version

if you are getting a response as follows.

Apache Maven 3.5.2 (138edd61fd100ec658bfa2d307c43b76940a5d7d; 2017-10-18T13:28:13+05:30)
Maven home: /usr/share/maven
Java version: 1.8.0_60, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_60.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.12.5", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

Congratulations!! you don’t want to install Maven, You already have it.


But if you are getting a message like this, you can go ahead with the tutorial

-bash: mvn: command not found

Installing Maven


Step I - Downloading Maven

Download maven from maven.apache.org


Step II - Extract the tar.gz

Navigate to the directory where tar.gz file downloaded & extract it to /usr/share/maven. You can use following terminal commands to exact directly in to /usr/share/maven.

Remember to change the maven version in the command!.

sudo tar -xvf apache-maven-3.5.2.tar.gz -C /usr/share/
cd /usr/share/
sudo mv apache-maven-3.5.2 maven


Step III - Update the HOME & PATH variables

export M2_HOME=/usr/share/maven
export PATH=$PATH:$M2_HOME/bin

Okay! now check the previous command again

$ mvn -version

if you are getting a response as follows.

Apache Maven 3.5.2 (138edd61fd100ec658bfa2d307c43b76940a5d7d; 2017-10-18T13:28:13+05:30)
Maven home: /usr/share/maven
Java version: 1.8.0_60, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_60.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.12.5", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

Congratulations! 🎉 you have correctly configured the Maven in your Mac!


Omal Perera

Software Engineer at 99X Technologies
Full Stack Developer expertise in React-native
Information Systems graduate.