Installing Oracle JDK for MacOS via Homebrew

MacOS has OpenJDK installed by default however I prefer to use Oracle’s version of JDK because its the official version. I don’t want to install it the same way Oracle instructs it on their docs as I find it very tedious. I’m a guy who loves automating stuff so I prefer to install it via Homebrew. I frequently do a clean install on my Mac every time there is a new version of OSX so I have to install JDK again and again. I’d rather just run a single installation script instead of heading over to Oracle’s website and following their instructions.

Steps to install and configure the Oracle JDK:

1. Install Homebrew and Cask
2. Install Oracle JDK
3. Setup the JAVA_HOME environment variable
4. Verifying installation

Homebrew and Cask

Homebrew is a package manager for Mac and has always been my preferred way to install my command line tools because I can integrate it with my setup scripts. To install it I’ll run

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

then I’ll install Homebrew Cask which is an extension of Homebrew. It makes the installation of large binaries and graphical applications simpler.

brew tap caskroom/versions

JDK Installation

Before I install the JDK, I’ll check first which version it will install by default. I’m very picky about the version because most of the time I just use Java for Android development. I also prefer the older and more stable version of JDK so I run

brew cask info java

which will output

java: 11.0.2,9
https://jdk.java.net/
Not installed
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/java.rb
==> Name
OpenJDK
==> Artifacts

This means that the latest version is JDK 11. I can install it now by running

brew cask install java

but I prefer to install JDK 8 over 11 so instead I’ll run

brew cask install java8

Setup Java_HOME environment variable

Once installed, I will set the JAVA_HOME environment variable by editing my .bash_profile

vim ~/.bash_profile

and inserting this line

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

and applying these changes by running

source ~/.bash_profile

Verifying Installation

Now to confirm if the installation was sucessful I’ll run this command.

java -version

If the installation is successful, its output would be similiar to this

java version "1.8.0_202"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_202-b08)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.202-b08, mixed mode)

This tells me that I have installed the Oracle version of the JDK. However if the output is like this

java version "1.8.0_202"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_202-b08)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.202-b08, mixed mode)

then I may have failed to install the JDK properly or the changes may not have been applied yet because I can see that OpenJDK is still being used. I’ll try to fix this by restarting my Mac then running “java -version” again.

Automating installation with a script

Below is a simple script to automate the installation of the latest Oracle JDK.

That’s it! Now you can automate your JDK installation on you Mac by running the script.