Maven & JDK 1.7 on Mac

Question

When I try to compile a project with Maven I get the following error:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:3.1:compile (default-compile) on project webserverlog: Compilation failure
[ERROR] No compiler is provided in this environment. Perhaps you are running on a JRE rather than a JDK?
[ERROR] -> [Help 1]
org.apache.maven.lifecycle.LifecycleExecutionException: Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:3.1:compile (default-compile) on project webserverlog: Compilation failure
No compiler is provided in this environment. Perhaps you are running on a JRE rather than a JDK?

My JAVA_HOME is pointing to the JDK:

$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home

$ $JAVA_HOME/bin/javac -version
javac 1.7.0_25
javac: no source files
Usage: javac <options> <source files>

I'm not sure why Maven adds '/jre' to the end of JAVA_HOME, but looking at some other posts this doesn't seem to be the problem:

$ mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 18:44:56+1000)
Maven home: /Users/jerry/dev/springsource/apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.7.0_25, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.8.4", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

I've searched for a solution to this problem and tried different things for the last couple of days, but can't find anything that works. I've seen some threads with a similar problem, but none of the suggestions worked for me.

Does anyone know how to solve this? Any help greatly appreciated...

Answer 1

You should assign the real path to the JDK to the JAVA_HOME variable instead of leaving the CurrentJDK literal. For some reason in Mac OS X the CurrentJDK is not pointing to the actual one regarding Maven. Try something like this in your .profile but replacing you actual jdk folder name:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home

Answer 2

FYI, one cause of "no source files" is lack of disk space wherever tmp points.

Looks like maven and javac store some items in TEMP/TMP/TMDIR and if that director doesn't exist, lacks space, lacks permissions then you can see that problem. at least we did on windows and I suspect it'll happen on better operating systems too.