Installing Maven under Mac OSX

Update 2011-09-12: Forget everything that's below here. Just install HomeBrew and type brew install maven.

Update 2008-03-28: Instead of following this article, you are probably better of with MacPorts. Thanks for the suggestion Nino!

I did not know it could be this hard to install Maven. I've installed Maven a bunch of times already but never before on a Mac. It took me about 1 hour!

Here is what you need to do:

• Download the apache-maven.tar.gz. If you follow the link on the maven download page both Firefox and Safari will get an html page but save it as a tar file. Look in the downloaded file (search for the string "apache-maven") and extract a real download link. When in doubt run md5 apache-maven-version.tar.gz on the result and compare it to the MD5 that is posted on the download page.
• Extract the tar somewhere. For example with tar xzf apache-maven-version.tar.gz. Here it gives an error (tar: A lone zero block at 3083) but so far it does not seem to affect the result.
• Ignore all the babbling about environment.plist files, and just create a ~/.bash_profile and put something like the following in it:
  export M2_HOME=/Users/erik/apps/apache-maven-2.0.8 export M2=$M2_HOME/bin export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/ export PATH=$PATH:$M2

That's it. Good luck!