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Wednesday 31 December 2008

Setting JAVA_HOME on Ubuntu

A thing that always annoys me about installing Java is that it doesn't automatically set up the JAVA_HOME environment variable after installation. I guess this is to avoid having problems when you have multiple virtual machines installed. Anyway, I use Ubuntu Linux to host the majority of my Java Application Server. It is easy install Java (sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk) but there always seems to be a debate about where to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. Some instructions say you should add it to your personal profile (e.g. ~/.bashrc) others suggest adding it to the global profile (i.e. /etc/profile), some people even suggest adding it directly in the init script for the services that need the variable. My suggest is to add an executable shell script to /etc/profile.d/ called javahome.sh. The content of the file would be: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun. All shell scripts (i.e. executable files with the extension .sh) located in the /etc/profile.d/ directory are loaded upon login and would therefore work for all users without having to change system files that may change upon the next O/S upgrade. To test the script simply type source /etc/profile This will reload the profile for the current user. To verify that the environment variable has been initialised type export|grep JAVA_HOME

Enjoy!

3 comments:

Stephen said...

Nice tip, but it's also worth noting that your /etc/profile must explicitly run the scripts in /etc/profile.d/

At the end of my /etc/profile I put;

for script in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
if [ -r $script ] ; then
. $script
fi
done

Allan Lykke Christensen said...

That's right. Actually on Ubuntu Linux, this is already in /etc/profile by default.

joshis said...

Thank you for the tips!

I believe there is also a file /etc/environment where you can set environmental variables - you can add JAVA_HOME variable there too.

If you just want to quickly reconfigure your java environment on ubuntu, note that there is also a command 'update-java-alternatives' (that works well at least with the java platforms installed via package system):

http://blogs.sun.com/pc/entry/easy_way_to_set_your