If you are a Java developer working on MicroServices, it’s very possible that you will be dealing with older services which are written on JDK 1.7(or older) and Maven (2.x). The newer services may be written in JDK 1.8 and Maven 3.x.

In order to work on both the new and old services, you would need to have all of Maven 2.x, Maven 3.x , JDK 1.8, JDK 1.7 installed on you OSX.

Even though you have multiple versions installed, your system environment variables can point to only one of the versions.

However, you can use the following script to easily switch between different versions on same or different terminal windows.

Create File

vi ~/.bash_profile

Enter contents

export MAVEN_HOME=/Users/esrinivasan/develop/maven

export PATH=$PATH:$MAVEN_HOME/bin

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.7)
setjdk() {
  export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v $1)
}


setmaven(){
    tmp="$PWD"
    cd /Users/esrinivasan/develop
    rm maven
    ln -s /Users/esrinivasan/develop/apache-maven-$1 maven
    cd "$tmp"
}

Usage

esrinivasan:localhost$ setjdk 1.7
esrinivasan:localhost$ setmaven 3.3.3

Output

esrinivasan:localhost$ mvn -version
Listening for transport dt_socket at address: 8453
Apache Maven 3.3.3 (7994120775791599e205a5524ec3e0dfe41d4a06; 2015-04-22T04:57:37-07:00)
Maven home: /Users/esrinivasan/develop/maven
Java version: 1.7.0_79, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_79.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.10.5", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"

Note

1. There are two different version of maven installed in two different locations :

	/Users/esrinivasan/develop/apache-maven-2.2.1
	/Users/esrinivasan/develop/apache-maven-3.3.3

2. There are two version of JDK installed  (1.7 and 1.8).

Note: esrinivasan is my machine name. You can replace it with whatever path you have on your machine.