Installing Maven

Maven is neither a part of the operating system nor the JDK. It has to be downloaded and installed in a very similar way to Ant. You can download Maven from its official website (https://maven.apache.org/) under the download section. Currently, the latest stable version is 3.3.9. When you download it, the actual release may be different; instead, use the latest stable version. You can download the source or the precompiled version. The easiest way is to download the binary in tar.gz format.

I cannot skip drawing your attention to the importance of checking the download integrity using checksums. I have detailed the way to do it in the section about Ant installation.

After the file is downloaded, you can explode it to a subdirectory using the following command:

tar xfz apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.tar.gz

The created subdirectory is the usable binary distribution of Maven. Usually, I move it under ~/bin, making it available only for my user on OS X. After that, you should add the bin directory of the installation to the PATH. To do that, you should edit the ~/.bashrc file and add the following lines to it:

export M2_HOME=~/bin/apache-maven-3.3.9/ 
export PATH=${M2_HOME}bin:$PATH

Then, restart the terminal application, or just type . ~/.bashrc and test the installation of Maven typing, as follows:

    $ mvn -v
Apache Maven 3.3.9 (bb52d8502b132ec0a5a3f4c09453c07478323dc5; 2015-11-10T17:41:47+01:00)
Maven home: /Users/verhasp/bin/apache-maven-3.3.9
Java version: 9-ea, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-9.jdk/Contents/Home
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.11.6", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

You should see a similar message on the screen that displays the installed Maven version and other information.