Use Java 6u65-apple with SKDMan on Mojave/High Sierra/Sierra/El Capitan

rstaatsUncategorized1 Comment

If you work in and around the world of Java, Groovy, Spring MVC, Grails, or Gradle you are bound to use a tool like sdkman when juggling multiple versions of these applications. If you haven’t used it before it’s worth taking for a spin. You can run simple commands like sdk install grails or sdk use java 8.0.181-zulu. This is great except that Java 6 isn’t really supported in sdkman for Mac. Queue the simple workaround!

Install SDK Man if you are not already using it, link is here

Go to the Apple Download page for Java 6 here

Next you will want to open terminal and do the following:

 cd ~/.sdkman/candidates/java/

Next you will create the following symlink:

 ln -s /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/ 6u65-apple

If this is successful you should be able to see it in the list when running sdk list java. Next we can verify that this worked successfully:

sdk use java 6u65-apple

You should now see a green print statement that reads “Using java version 6u65-apple in this shell. You can further validate that its working by running java -version. Your output should resemble the below:

java -version
java version "1.6.0_65"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_65-b14-468)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.65-b04-468, mixed mode)