Macos Java Home Intellij Jdk Mac

Installing OpenJDK on MacOS is easy with HomeBrew. If you haven’t got HomeBrew installed, install HomeBrew by running:

    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
    echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> /Users/nitin.katkam/.zprofile

Then, install OpenJDK with:

    brew install java

Define environment variables with:

    echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
    echo 'export JAVA_HOME=/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home'

Download Apache Maven from: https://dlcdn.apache.org/maven/maven-3/3.8.4/binaries/apache-maven-3.8.4-bin.tar.gz and define the M2_HOME and PATH variables to the extracted path and to the bin subdirectory.

The /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/ seems like the Java Home directory but because IntelliJ looks for a different JDK directory structure, it complains with a “The selected directory points to a JRE not a JDK”, so we instead specify the path in the ./libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home instead.

Open a Java project with IntelliJ, and from the File menu, select Project Structure.

IntelliJ - File - Project Structure{:class=“img-responsive”}

In the popup dialog box, press Cmd+Shift+G to specify an absolute path and enter: /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home

IntelliJ - Project Structure - SDK{:class=“img-responsive”}

Other Notes

Turns out that there’s an executable named java_home that gives us the correct JAVA_HOME path.

export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 19.0.1`

Also, brew info openjdk provides an alternate approach:

brew info openjdk  # This gives the following command to run (within the output)
sudo ln -sfn /usr/local/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk