Although Java is one of my favorite languages to dump on, I have been using Java for Exercism.io problems. Not only have I been trying to get some in with Java itself, but other languages like Clojure and CFML depend on have some version of Java installed on your system, either just the runtime environment (JRE) or the whole development kit (JDK). In this post I'll talk about Jabba, my new favorite cli tool for installing and switching Java versions!
Pains & Desires
This whole thing started because on my macbook I had java 14 installed with brew:
brew install java
However, I was trying to run things that, "only worked in Java 8-13", I didn't really want to mess around with uninstalling and reinstalling every time. I just wanted something that was easy and simple like node's nvm. It was during a google search similar to that when I originally found Jabba. Jabba even describes itself right at the top of its README as, "inspired by nvm"! When I started using it I thought to myself "Hey, think isn't so bad".
Installing Jabba
You should probably use the command in the instructions in the Jabba repo, but I'm on macOs 10.15.3 and run this to install it:
curl -sL https://github.com/shyiko/jabba/raw/master/install.sh | bash && . ~/.jabba/jabba.sh
You may need to start a new shell in order to have the jabba command available, but you should be able to just say "jabba":
jabba
This should give you a whole bunch of output about how to use jabba (rather than an error that the command was not found).
To see the version of jabba installed:
To see the version of jabba installed:
jabba --version
To see ALL the available versions of Java:
jabba ls-remote
To see all the versions of Java 13:
jabba ls-remote | grep @1.13
Then choose the Java distribution you like and install the latest version.
For example looking at the above choices you might choose "openjdk@1.13.0-2".
You can install it through jabba with this command:
java install openjdk@1.13
This will install the latest 1.13.X version of the openjdk flavor of Java, which is 1.13.0 (keep in mind that the dashes represent pre-releases). It should automatically switch your current shell's Java version to the version you just installed as well.
To check the current Java version you're using:
java --version
Suppose though that you open a new shell that defaults back to Java 14. You already have Java 13 installed, so you just need to use it:
jabba use openjdk@1.13.0
Final Remarks
I think jabba is a great tool. I'm afraid I'd say it's not totally as nice to use as nvm is, but it'll do just fine. Part of the confusion comes from all the various different flavors of Java, which can be overwhelming sometimes and the interesting version scheme to always use "1" as the major version.
By contrast, with nvm you can run these two short and sweet commands:
By contrast, with nvm you can run these two short and sweet commands:
nvm i v13 nvm use v13
Sadly, jabba doesn't support the "i" alias for install, you gotta type that baby out every dang time.
* "aww shucks", says someone in the back of the crowd. *
Not to worry though. I'm confident we can all band together to get this extremely necessarily to the survival of the human race feature added to jabba. Please thumbs-up my issue here: https://github.com/shyiko/jabba/issues/666
That's all for now. Happy coding, err' body!
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