Different Maven Versions on OS X

April 24th, 2009 by nils

I keep running into the problem that different projects I’m working on require different versions of maven. I have two versions installed, maven 2.0.6 in /usr/share/maven-2.0.6 and maven 2.0.9 in /usr/share/maven. To find out which version of maven you are running, open a terminal and type the following

$ mvn --version
Maven version: 2.0.9
Java version: 1.6.0_07
OS name: "mac os x" version: "10.5.6" arch: "x86_64" Family: "mac"

In this case, maven 2.0.9 is running, so we’ll see how to switch to maven 2.0.6. First we need to know where the maven executable, or in this case, the symbolic link to the executable is located:

$ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn

Next, we’ll use ls to check where the symbolic link is pointing:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/mvn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  24 Apr 24 14:26 /usr/bin/mvn -> /usr/share/maven/bin/mvn

Finally, if you have different maven versions installed, you can switch between them by overwriting the symbolic link:

$ sudo ln -fhsv /usr/share/maven-2.0.6/bin/mvn /usr/bin/mvn

After providing your password, the symbolic link should now be pointing to the maven 2.0.6 executable. To doublecheck, type

$ mvn --version

The output should be something like this

Maven version: 2.0.6

Tags: code, development, java, maven, OS X
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