- How to Set JAVA_HOME for JDK & JRE: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- Expert Q&A
- You Might Also Like
- About This Article
- Is this article up to date?
- Quizzes
- You Might Also Like
- How to Find JAVA_HOME
- Get started with Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2, through the Learn Spring course:
- > CHECK OUT THE COURSE
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Windows-Specific Ways to Find JAVA_HOME
- 3. macOS and Linux-Specific Ways to Find JAVA_HOME
- 4. Using Java to Find JAVA_HOME
- 5. Conclusion
How to Set JAVA_HOME for JDK & JRE: A Step-by-Step Guide
This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Nicole Levine, MFA. Nicole Levine is a Technology Writer and Editor for wikiHow. She has more than 20 years of experience creating technical documentation and leading support teams at major web hosting and software companies. Nicole also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University and teaches composition, fiction-writing, and zine-making at various institutions.
This article has been viewed 323,663 times.
Are you seeing Java errors like «JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly?» or «JAVA_HOME is set to an invalid directory?» If you’ve recently installed the Java Development Kit (JDK) or the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), you’ll need to set your JAVA_HOME variables and configure the path so applications know where to find Java. This wikiHow article will show you the easiest ways to change or set the Java home path on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Before you can set JAVA_HOME, you’ll need the full path to your JDK or JRE installation.
- Once you set the JAVA_HOME environment variable, you can run the command echo $JAVA_HOME to see the new path.
- To set the Java home and path on Linux or macOS permanently (even after a reboot), add the environment variables to your .bashrc or .zshrc file.
Windows
- Open File Explorer, click This PC in the left panel, then navigate to C:\Program Files\Java. The directory you’re looking for should have the name of the JDK version, such as C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-19.
- If you installed the JRE instead of the JDK, you’ll have something like C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_351 instead.
- You can also open the command prompt and run the command wmic product where «Name like ‘%%Java%%'» get installlocation,Name . This will tell you the full path of the JDK, even if you haven’t yet set JAVA_HOME.
- Press the Windows key on your keyboard and type advanced system .
- Click View advanced system settings in the search results.
Click the Environment Variables button. You’ll see it at the bottom-right corner of the System Properties window.
- If you have multiple installations of the JDK and want to change JAVA_HOME to your new installation, select the current JAVA_HOME user variable and click Edit… instead.
- If you’re editing the current JAVA_HOME path, you’ll already have JAVA_HOME here. So, you can skip this step.
- If you’re adding a second path to JAVA_HOME, just type a semicolon (;) after the first path, then enter the second path.
- If you’re replacing an old JAVA_HOME path, just delete the current path and enter the new one.
- If you want other users on this PC to be able to access Java binaries from the command line, repeat this step for the «Path» variable under «System variables» as well.
- Click the New button at the top.
- Enter the full path to the JRE or JDK with \bin at the end. For example, C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-19\bin or C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_351\bin.
- Click OK.
- You won’t need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect, but you will need to relaunch any apps that were trying to access Java.
- Open a new command prompt window and run the command echo %JAVA_HOME% to display the new path to JAVA_HOME.
- Make sure this is a new command prompt window. If you still have the same window open, the command will fail because it doesn’t have the new environment variables.
macOS
Open a Terminal window. To open Terminal, search for Terminal in Spotlight. Or, you can open Finder, click the Go menu, select Utilities, and choose the Terminal app.
- If you have more than one Java installation and want to see the paths to all of them, use /usr/libexec/java_home -V instead.
Copy the path and paste it somewhere handy. Highlight the path to the Java installation you want to use as JAVA_HOME, press Cmd + V to copy it, then paste it into a sticky note or text file.
- Type cd ~ and press Return.
- Type open .zshrc and press Return. This should open the file in a text editor.
- If the file is not found, type echo > .zshrc and press Return. Then, run open .zshrc again.
- export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home
- Replace /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-17.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home with the full path to the /Contents/Home directory of your Java installation if it’s different.
Type source .zshrc and press ⏎ Return . Once you’ve edited your profile, this command ensures that your environment variables will be updated for the current terminal window (and any other windows you open from now on).
- If you had any other windows open that were attempting to find Java binaries, close and reopen them.
- Shopping for PC accessories or office supplies? Check out our coupon site for Staples discounts or our coupon site for Office Depot.
Linux
- readlink -f `which javac`
- If that doesn’t work, try running update-alternatives —list java .
- If neither of these commands works, run whereis java , which will usually result in a symbolic link like /usr/bin/java.
- Once you get the directory, find out where it links using ls -la /bin/java .
- If that points you to another directory, e.g., /etc/alternatives/java, run ls -la /etc/alternatives/java .
- At that point, you should see a much longer directory, which is actually the home to the Java binaries. For example, usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-arm64/bin/java . This is the directory you want.
- echo «export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-arm64» >> ~/.bashrc
- echo «export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin» >> ~/.bashrc
Expert Q&A
In Linux, you can set JAVA__HOME for all users by editing the global .bashrc, which is located at /etc/bash.bashrc. Just use echo and replace ~/.bashrc with /etc/bash.bashrc .
You Might Also Like
Use Easy Windows CMD Commands to Check Your Java Version
How to Do Division in Java (Integer and Floating Point)
How to Compile and Run Java Programs Using Notepad++
Simple Steps to Type a Bunny with Your Keyboard
About This Article
This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Nicole Levine, MFA. Nicole Levine is a Technology Writer and Editor for wikiHow. She has more than 20 years of experience creating technical documentation and leading support teams at major web hosting and software companies. Nicole also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University and teaches composition, fiction-writing, and zine-making at various institutions. This article has been viewed 323,663 times.
Is this article up to date?
Quizzes
You Might Also Like
Use Easy Windows CMD Commands to Check Your Java Version
How to Do Division in Java (Integer and Floating Point)
How to Compile and Run Java Programs Using Notepad++
How to Find JAVA_HOME
As always, the writeup is super practical and based on a simple application that can work with documents with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted fields.
We rely on other people’s code in our own work. Every day.
It might be the language you’re writing in, the framework you’re building on, or some esoteric piece of software that does one thing so well you never found the need to implement it yourself.
The problem is, of course, when things fall apart in production — debugging the implementation of a 3rd party library you have no intimate knowledge of is, to say the least, tricky.
Lightrun is a new kind of debugger.
It’s one geared specifically towards real-life production environments. Using Lightrun, you can drill down into running applications, including 3rd party dependencies, with real-time logs, snapshots, and metrics.
Learn more in this quick, 5-minute Lightrun tutorial:
Slow MySQL query performance is all too common. Of course it is. A good way to go is, naturally, a dedicated profiler that actually understands the ins and outs of MySQL.
The Jet Profiler was built for MySQL only, so it can do things like real-time query performance, focus on most used tables or most frequent queries, quickly identify performance issues and basically help you optimize your queries.
Critically, it has very minimal impact on your server’s performance, with most of the profiling work done separately — so it needs no server changes, agents or separate services.
Basically, you install the desktop application, connect to your MySQL server, hit the record button, and you’ll have results within minutes:
DbSchema is a super-flexible database designer, which can take you from designing the DB with your team all the way to safely deploying the schema.
The way it does all of that is by using a design model, a database-independent image of the schema, which can be shared in a team using GIT and compared or deployed on to any database.
And, of course, it can be heavily visual, allowing you to interact with the database using diagrams, visually compose queries, explore the data, generate random data, import data or build HTML5 database reports.
Get started with Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2, through the Learn Spring course:
> CHECK OUT THE COURSE
1. Introduction
In this quick tutorial, we’ll learn how to find JAVA_HOME on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
As we all know, JAVA_HOME is an environment variable that we commonly use to locate java executables, like java and javac.
2. Windows-Specific Ways to Find JAVA_HOME
If we’re using Windows as the operating system, first we need to open up our command line (cmd) and type:
If JAVA_HOME is defined in our environment, then the above command will print it out.
Or to show the location of the java executable, we can try:
3. macOS and Linux-Specific Ways to Find JAVA_HOME
If we’re using either macOS or Linux, we can open up our terminal and type:
If JAVA_HOME is defined in our environment, then the above command will print it out.
This probably just shows us /usr/bin/java, which really isn’t very helpful since it’s a symbolic link. To unravel this, we’ll use dirname and readlink.
dirname $(dirname $(readlink -f $(which javac)))
$(dirname $(readlink $(which javac)))/java_home
This command prints the currently used java folder.
4. Using Java to Find JAVA_HOME
If we’re able to run java ourselves, then we have a nearly platform-independent way as well:
java -XshowSettings:properties -version
Running this command outputs numerous properties, one of them being java.home.
To parse it though, we’ll still need a platform-specific tool.
For Linux and macOS, we’ll use grep:
java -XshowSettings:properties -version 2>&1 > /dev/null | grep 'java.home'
For Windows, we’ll use findstr:
java -XshowSettings:properties -version 2>&1 | findstr "java.home"
5. Conclusion
In this brief article, we learned how to find JAVA_HOME on different operating systems.
If this didn’t work though, it’s possible we didn’t set the JAVA_HOME variable properly while installing Java.
Slow MySQL query performance is all too common. Of course it is. A good way to go is, naturally, a dedicated profiler that actually understands the ins and outs of MySQL.
The Jet Profiler was built for MySQL only, so it can do things like real-time query performance, focus on most used tables or most frequent queries, quickly identify performance issues and basically help you optimize your queries.
Critically, it has very minimal impact on your server’s performance, with most of the profiling work done separately — so it needs no server changes, agents or separate services.
Basically, you install the desktop application, connect to your MySQL server, hit the record button, and you’ll have results within minutes: