Set Java Home to a specific version on Mac

Installing Oracle’s version of Java on your machine does (for most machines I’ve encountered) add a Java Home system variable. Rarely however it doesn’t work on some machines. Such folks are recommended to add the path themselves.

On a Mac, you can do this by using the following

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

This information is littered across the internet and isn’t hard to find at all. However, this specific machine, when upgraded from Java 1.7 to Java 1.8 kept insisting it’s home is Java 1.7. The Java Home script at /usr/libexec on the mac should take care of this but it hadn’t. In such situations you can explicitly tell it which version to load by passing a version parameter to it

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8)

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