Trying to run through a screencast I’m putting together after upgrading to Leopard, I noticed Maven giving me a strange error when trying to run archetype:generate and realized that Leopard includes its own version of Maven (and Ant) out of the box.  The problem is that it’s version 2.0.6, which doesn’t have support for this feature.  I then set about trying to upgrade Maven (and in the process, Java) and here is what I uncovered.

First of all, I screwed myself over a bit by customizing my /etc/profile under Tiger; there were changes to this file that came in with Leopard but I can’t see where the updater tried to merge them in at all.  There are changes in Leopard to how paths are configured using a script called /etc/path_helper, but I don’t have any of that getting executed.  It took me a while to figure out this was the reason my .profile, .bash_profile, etc weren’t getting source’d properly.  What I did was pull out all of my updates to /etc/profile and just add in the following:

So at least now I have my .profile getting loaded properly.  I’d still be interested to see someone’s /etc/profile that works out of the box with the call to /etc/path_helper, but this is all beside the point.

Applying the Java update was painless – it worked fine through the Apple Software Update utility.  You can download it here manually if you need to.

Next, you’ll probably notice that Java 6 isn’t enabled by default.  This blog will show you how to switch over to 6 using the Java Preferences utility.  There is a flaw in the ointment, though – for some reason it appears that it doesn’t switch over all of the symlinks properly.  Maven’s startup script gets confused by this in a few steps.  You can read more about it in this message (some JIRA comments) from their mailing list.  The workaround is to just point your JAVA_HOME directly to the 1.6/Home directory.

You can install the newer version of Maven at this point.  I saw this post detailing the instructions, but it was what I expected.  Just download the latest version and extract it to where you keep these kinds of things.  Then you just have to update your .profile (or .bash_profile) to set up some environmental variables for you.  Here’s what I included in my ~/.profile:

You’ll need to do source ~/.profile or exit out of your terminal and open it up again for the changes to take effect.  Once you do you can test to make sure you’re seeing the right version of Maven:

You can also check this by doing:

I guess we can chalk this one up to kicking the tires on Leopard. Hope this makes the process a little less painless for someone else!

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