Installation on macOS Platforms

Installation on macOS Platforms #

GraalVM is available for macOS on x64 and AArch64 architectures.

Note that on macOS the JDK installation path is: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home.

Follow these steps to install GraalVM:

Navigate to the GraalVM Downloads page. Select 21 for the Java version, macOS for the operating system, x64 or aarch64 for the architecture, and download.

Unzip the archive.

 tar -xzf graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture>.tar.gz

Alternatively, open the file in Finder.

Move the downloaded package to its proper location, the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines directory. Since this is a system directory, sudo is required:
```
sudo mv graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture> /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines
```
To verify if the move is successful and to get a list of all installed JDKs, run /usr/libexec/java_home -V.
There can be multiple JDKs installed on the machine. The next step is to configure the runtime environment:
- Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to resolve to the GraalVM installation directory:
```
 export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home
```
- Set the value of the PATH environment variable to the GraalVM bin directory:
```
 export PATH=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home/bin:$PATH
```
To check whether the installation was successful, run the java -version command.

Optionally, you can specify GraalVM as the default JRE or JDK installation in your Java IDE.

Installation Notes #

On JAVA_HOME Command #

The information property file, Info.plist, is in the top level Contents directory. This means that GraalVM participates in the macOS-specific /usr/libexec/java_home mechanism. Depending on other JDK installation(s) available, it is now possible that /usr/libexec/java_home -v21 returns /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home. You can run /usr/libexec/java_home -v21 -V to see the complete list of JVMs available to the java_home command. This command sorts the JVMs in decreasing version order and chooses the top one as the default for the specified version. Within a specific version, the sort order appears to be stable but is unspecified.