Maven not picking JAVA_HOME correctly

Question

I am on windows environment and using maven to compile my project. Although I just created the project and added the dependencies for various libararies.

As I added them maven started complaining for the missing tools.jar, so i added below to my pom.xml:

<dependency>   <groupId>com.sun</groupId>   <artifactId>tools</artifactId>   <version>1.6</version>   <scope>system</scope>   <systemPath>${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar</systemPath> </dependency> 

When i ran the maven install, i got an error for the missing jar as below :

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project GApp: Could not resolve dependencies for project GApp:GApp:war:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT: Could not find artifact com.sun:tools:jar:1.6 at specified path C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar -> [Help 1] 

The issue is that the tools.jar is in "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_26\lib" and is correctly set in the JAVA_HOME environment variable but the maven is still looking in jre folder as in error message "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar".

C:\>echo %JAVA_HOME% C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_26 

Interestingly: when i set the full path in dependency, it worked just fine. But i don't want to hard code it.

<dependency>   <groupId>com.sun</groupId>   <artifactId>tools</artifactId>   <version>1.6</version>   <scope>system</scope>   <systemPath>C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_26\lib\tools.jar</systemPath> </dependency> 

Can someone suggest any dynamic solution for this?

Answer 1

It's a bug in the Eclipse Maven support. Eclipse doesn't support all of the global Maven properties as per the Maven specs.

According to the specs:

${java.home} specifies the path to the current JRE_HOME environment use with relative paths to get for example

At least in Eclipse 4.3.1 that is not the case, here java.home always points to the JRE that was used to launch Eclipse, not the build JRE.

To fix the issue you need to start Eclipse using the JRE from the JDK by adding something like this to eclipse.ini (before -vmargs!):

-vm C:/<your_path_to_jdk170>/jre/bin/server/jvm.dll 

Answer 2

It seems your JAVA_HOME is set to point to the JRE in eclipse.