1. Overview

Simply put, Maven is a command-line tool for building and managing any Java-based project.

The Maven Project provides a simple ZIP file containing a precompiled version of Maven for our convenience. There is no installer. It's up to us to set up our prerequisites and environment to run Maven.

Further reading:

Apache Maven Tutorial

A quick and practical guide to building and managing Java projects using Apache Maven.

Maven Dependency Scopes

A quick and practical guide to dependency scopes in Maven.

How to Create an Executable JAR with Maven

A quick and practical guide to creating executable JARs with Maven

The installation of Apache Maven is a simple process of extracting the archive followed by configuring the maven such that the mvn executable is available in the OS classpath.

1.1. Prerequisites

Maven is written in Java. So, to run Maven, we need a system that has Java installed and configured properly. We can download an OS-compatible Java JDK from Oracle's download site, for example.  It's recommended to install it to a pathname without spaces.

Once Java is installed, we need to ensure that the commands from the Java JDK are in our PATH environment variable. Running, for example:

java -version

must display the right version number.

2. Installing Maven on Windows

To install Maven on windows, we head over to the Apache Maven site to download the latest version and select the Maven zip file, for example, apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.zip.

Then we unzip it to the folder where we want Maven to live.

2.1. Adding Maven to the Environment Path

We add both M2_HOME and MAVEN_HOME variables to the Windows environment using system properties and point it to our Maven folder.

Then we update the PATH variable by appending the Maven bin folder — %M2_HOME%\bin — so that we can run the Maven command everywhere.

To verify it, we run:

mvn -version

in the command prompt. It should display the Maven version, the java version, and the operating system information. That's it. We've set up Maven on our Windows system.

3. Installing Maven on Linux

To install Maven on the Linux operating system, we download the latest version from the Apache Maven site and select the Maven binary tar.gz file, for example, apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.tar.gz.

Redhat, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distribution are using the BASH as their default shell. In the below section, we will be using bash commands.

Now we extract the archive to our desired location.

$ tar -xvf apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.tar.gz -C /usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-3.3.9

3.1. Adding Maven to the Environment Path

We open the command terminal and edit the .bashrc file using the below command.

$ nano ~/.bashrc 

Add maven-specific lines to the file.

 export M2_HOME=/usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-3.3.9
 export M2=$M2_HOME/bin
 export MAVEN_OPTS=-Xms256m -Xmx512m
 export PATH=$M2:$PATH 

Once we save the file, we can reload the environment configuration without restarting, using the below command.

$ source ~/.bashrc

Finally, we can verify if Maven has been added:

$ mvn -version

The output should be as follows:

Apache Maven 3.3.3 (7994120775791599e205a5524ec3e0dfe41d4a06; 2016-12-03T17:27:37+05:30)
Maven home: /usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-3.3.9

Java version: 1.8.0_75, vendor: Oracle Corporation

Java home: /usr/local/java-current/jdk1.8.0_75/jre

We have successfully installed Maven on our Linux system.

3.2. Installing Maven on Ubuntu

In a terminal, we run apt-cache search maven to get all the available Maven packages:

$ apt-cache search maven
....
libxmlbeans-maven-plugin-java-doc - Documentation for Maven XMLBeans Plugin
maven - Java software project management and comprehension tool
maven-debian-helper - Helper tools for building Debian packages with Maven
maven2 - Java software project management and comprehension tool

The Maven package always comes with the latest Apache Maven.

We run the command sudo apt-get install maven to install the latest Apache Maven.

$ sudo apt-get install maven

This will take a few minutes to download. Once downloaded, we can run the mvn -version to verify our installation.

4. Installing Maven on Mac OS X

To install Maven on Mac OS X operating system, we download the latest version from the Apache Maven site and select the Maven binary tar.gz file, for example, apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.tar.gz.

Then we extract the archive to our desired location.

4.1. Adding Maven to the Environment Path

We open the terminal and switch to the directory where the files were extracted to and then log in as Super – User.

Then we remove the tar.gz archive:

rm Downloads/apache-maven*bin.tar.gz

Fix the permissions:

chown -R root:wheel Downloads/apache-maven*

Switch the Maven contents:

mv Downloads/apache-maven* /opt/apache-maven

Archive the Admin session:

exit

Add Maven binaries to the path and append:

nano $HOME/.profile

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/apache-maven/bin

Finally, we use Ctrl+x to Save and Exit from nano.

To load the new set up, run:

bash

To test the new installation, run:

mvn -version

We are now ready to use Maven on our Mac OS X.

4.2. Adding Maven to the Environment Path for macOS Catalina or Higher.

In the case of macOS Catalina or a higher version where the default shell is zsh, we have to append to a  different file instead:

nano ~/.zshenv 
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/apache-maven/bin

To reload the environment, we need to issue:

source ~/.zshenv 

The rest of the operation remains the same.

4.3. HighSierra Compatibility

For HighSierra users, we'll need to additionally add Maven binaries to the path and append:

nano $HOME/.bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/apache-maven/bin

Ctrl+x to save and exit from nano.

To load the new setup, run bash.

5. Conclusion

This quick article illustrated how to install Maven on the major operating systems for development.

To learn how to get started with Spring with Maven, check out the tutorial here.