Apache Maven is a software project management tool that is supposed to “make the build process easy.”
Unfortunately for me, the installation process for Maven was pretty frustrating.
After I followed the installation guide line-by-line, the command line printed out the following error:
“‘mvn’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.”
Honestly, I really do hate that error.
I followed the Maven installation guide, word-for-word and I even checked the user and environment variables multiple times, just to make sure that I hadn’t messed anything up by making a typo or something.
However, all of the user variables were correct.
For reference:
- M2_HOME: This is a user variable that points towards your Maven directory.
- M2: This is an environment variable that points towards Maven’s bin folder. Example: $M2_HOME/bin
- JAVA_HOME: Points towards the directory of your JDK.
Frustratingly enough, none of this seemed to work on my Windows 7 machine.
The fix?
Basically, I just made sure that all of variables listed above existed as environment variables.
In other words, I moved M2_HOME from the user variable section over into the environment variable section.
Why this worked? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe someone with a little more knowledge about Windows will be able to elaborate on this.
Hopefully this saves someone a few headaches!