Change Maven JDK

Sometimes you want Maven to compile your code with a different JDK than is the one assigned to your JAVA_HOME. For instance, I have code in a project that I'm working on that only compiles on Java 1.5. My JAVA_HOME, however, is 1.6. So, how do we specify the JDK for Maven?

Go to the pom.xml for the module or submodule that needs a specific JDK version for compilation, and insert such a goody:

<project>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<artifactid>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactid>
<configuration>
<source>1.5</source>
<target>1.5</target>
<compilerversion>1.5</compilerversion>
<executable>/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/bin/javac</executable>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</project>

Notice that the executable for javac is hardcoded in the pom.xml. That's not the most awesome thing to do, so you can use a property for the absolute path that can be specified on a per-user basis. For more details, see the Apache documentation.

Now mvn compile, etc, and JDK 1.5 will be used where you have specified.