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CS156

This page is our best effort at explaining how to set up an environment for CMPSC 156 for MacOS.

For information on:

Note that the reference platform for the course remains “CSIL”; we cannot commit to being “tech support” for every conceivable platform. On your own machine, you are your own tech support. But we’ll help as best we can, given the time constraints we are under.

Preliminaries

Installing MacOS: Homebrew is your first step. brew is a package manager for MacOS, and it is needed for the steps that follow.

Install the JDK

To see whether you already have the JDK installed, do this in a terminal window:

169-231-88-206:~ pconrad$ javac -version
javac 1.8.0_31
169-231-88-206:~ pconrad$

If you see some version of Java 17.something… then you are good to go.

If not, download and install Java 17 using either the

  • Official Oracle distribution (see below)
  • The OpenJDK 11 distribution (see below)

There are three Slack channels that can help:

  • Use the #help-macos channel to ask questions if you run into problems.
  • Use the #articles-macos channel to offer tips, tricks, or links to resources that may help other students.
  • Use the #typos channel if there are things in these instructions that are incorrect and should be updated.

Installing Java 17 from Oracle on Mac

Oracle has a link for installing Java JDK 11 on Mac on this page: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-jdk11-downloads.html

Installing OpenJDK 17 on Mac

This worked for me. Note that it requires brew, a package manager for MacOS.

To install Java with homebrew, use:

   brew update
   brew install openjdk@17

Then you must do this step, which is documneted in the output that shows up when you run the brew install openjdk@17 command:

   sudo ln -sfn /usr/local/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

To check if you now have Java 17, open a new Terminal window and do:

   java -version

If it worked, you should see something like this:

   # java -version
   openjdk 17.0.1 2021-10-19
   OpenJDK Runtime Environment Homebrew (build 17.0.1+1)
   OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Homebrew (build 17.0.1+1, mixed mode, sharing)

Install Maven

After installing Java 11, do this to install maven:

brew install maven

Or if you already have Maven installed:

brew upgrade maven

And then do:

mvn --version

To make sure that Maven is using Java 17 and not still using Java 8 or earlier.

What if Maven reports it is using the wrong version of Java?

Sometimes, when installing a newer version of Maven with brew, it may bring along a later version of Java as a dependency.

However, my hope is that if we configure our pom.xml files to use Java 17, perhaps this won’t be an issue.

Install Heroku CLI

Follow instructions here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli

Install Node/npm

To install node and npm on Mac, use:

brew install node

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