Install Maven

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Goal

Install Apache Maven and verify it can find your JDK. After this page you will be able to run mvn -v and see Maven 3.9 plus your JDK 21.

Prerequisites

• JDK 21 installed

What Maven is

Maven is Java's standard build tool. It does three jobs:

1. Downloads the libraries your project depends on (it calls them dependencies).
2. Compiles your .java files into .class files.
3. Packages the result into a runnable artifact (a .jar).

A Maven project is defined by one file at its root: pom.xml. POM stands for Project Object Model. It lists the project's name, version, JDK level, and dependencies. We will not write one by hand — Spring Initializr will hand us one on a later page.

Maven is not the only option. Gradle is the other common Java build tool. We pick Maven here because Spring's documentation defaults to it and the generated pom.xml reads top-to-bottom without DSL knowledge. For the rest of this tier we will only use Maven.

Install

On macOS with Homebrew:

brew install maven

On Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y maven

On Windows, download the binary zip from maven.apache.org, unzip it, and add the bin/ directory to your PATH. The official install steps cover the details.

Verify

mvn -v

Expected output (paths will differ):

Apache Maven 3.9.9
Maven home: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/maven/3.9.9/libexec
Java version: 21.0.5, vendor: Eclipse Adoptium
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "14.6", arch: "aarch64"

The line that matters is Java version: 21.x. If Maven reports a different JDK, your JAVA_HOME is pointing at an old install — set it to your JDK 21 path before continuing.

Next → Classes and primitives