Maven doesn't read JAVA_HOME


I was going mad. No matter what I did, mvn would not read my Java settings.

Of course, I had done what all articles on the interweb said, setting JAVA_HOME to my preferred Java version, and yes, of course that was a JDK and not a JRE:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/oracle-java8-jdk-amd64/bin/java
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

The shell was happy with that change:

$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/lib/jvm/oracle-java8-jdk-amd64/bin/java
$ which java
/usr/lib/jvm/oracle-java8-jdk-amd64/bin/java

And calling java (and javac) were all in agreement:

$ java -version
java_version "1.8.0_144"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_144-b01)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.144-b01, mixed mode)

However, Maven was acting up like a grumpy teenager, refusing to use it:

$ mvn -version
Apache Maven 3.6.3 (cecedd343002696d0abb50b32b541b8a6ba2883f)
Maven home: /opt/apache-maven-3.6.3
Java version: 11.0.9, vendor: Debian, runtime: /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64
Default locale: en_GB, platform encoding: UTF-8

As you can see, it somehow picked up one of the other JDKs on my system, located in /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64.

strace to the rescue

After some time of fruitless reading of the Maven manual, blog posts and Stack Overflow posts, I turned to my old trusted friend, strace:

$ strace -e read mvn -version
read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\260A\2\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832
read(10, "#!/bin/sh\n\n# Licensed to the Apa"..., 8192) = 5741
read(11, "JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-j"..., 8192) = 35

Aha! When calling the mvn command, it read something that said JAVA_HOME should be /usr/lib/jvm/default-java. And this /usr/lib/jvm/default-java was the before mentioned JDK 11:

$ ls -l /usr/lib/jvm/default-java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Dec 30  2018 /usr/lib/jvm/default-java -> java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64/

and some bash

Next up was to debug the mvn command itself. Since this was a bash command, debugging it was as easy as calling it with bash -x:

$ bash -x $(which mvn) -version
+ '[' -z '' ']'
+ '[' -f /etc/mavenrc ']'
+ '[' -f /home/torstein/.mavenrc ']'
+ . /home/torstein/.mavenrc
++ JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java

There, it was plain for the world (well, me) to see that it read ~/.mavenrc which had JAVA_HOME set. So, I (or some install script) had set this once upon a time and I'd completely forgotten about it.

Now, finally, I'm in total control of my Maven runtime environment 😉

Even faster

After thinking about this some more, I realise I could've arrived at the solution with one step less, using the -f (follow) flag to strace including all files in my $HOME directory, and excluding files in the source code repository I was builing:

$ strace -y -f -e read mvn -f ~/src/foo/pom.xml 2>&1 | 
    grep $HOME |
    grep -v ~/.m2/repository |
    grep -v $HOME/src/foo
read(11</home/torstein/.mavenrc>, "JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java"..., 8192) = 85
read(11</home/torstein/.mavenrc>, "", 8192) = 0
[pid 24643] read(3<pipe:[247857]>, "/home/torstein\n", 128) = 15
[pid 24658] read(3<pipe:[246954]>, "/home/torstein\n", 128) = 15
[pid 24656] read(3<pipe:[246583]>, "/home/torstein/src\n", 128) = 19
[pid 24656] read(3<pipe:[246584]>, "/home/torstein\n", 128) = 15

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