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CS156

“Illegal Class Exception” or other errors have to do with version mismatch

On MacOS, if you are seeing errors having to do with “Illegal Class Exception” or other errors have to do with version mismatch, here is a strategy for solving that.

First thing to check:

java --version
mvn --version

You want them both to be the same version of Java (e.g. Java 17)

What you do NOT want is for java --version to say one version of Java (e.g. Java 17) but then mvn --version says a different version, (e.g. Java 19)

If that is what you see, here’s an approach to fixing it.

First, make sure you know which version of MacOS you are on, and what it’s default shell is.

For example

  • Monterey uses zsh
  • Catalina uses zsh
  • Some others may still use bash

Whatever your default shell, you want to identify the startup file for that shell. For example

  • for zsh you’d edit .zshrc

And what you want to put in there is a good definition for JAVA_HOME. Substitute in for 17 the correct LTS version of Java for the course:

export JAVA_HOME="${JAVA_HOME:-$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 17)}"

If you load this in your startup file, then you need to open a brand new terminal, and check

echo $JAVA_HOME
java --version
mvn --version

If you now see that $JAVA_HOME is defined as the directory where Java 17 lives, and that both java and mvn are giving us Java 17, try doing what was failing in a brand new terminal window.

Try a mvn clean before you do anything else though.