How to change the default JRE in Mac OS X (Leopard)

The problem was, my Eclipse installation was setup to use JRE 1.6 but when I checked using

mvn --version

it reported that it was using JRE 1.5. The solution's pretty simple in fact. The versions of Java JRE that are installed on your Mac are located in

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

If you list the contents of the folder in terminal using

ls -al

then you'll see a symbolic link called "CurrentJDK" pointing to a symbolic link called "1.5" pointing to the latest version of 1.5 installed. Delete this link and recreate it pointing it to the symbolic link called "1.6" and you're done. The following code will achieve this.

 cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framwork/Versions/
sudo rm -r CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

UPDATE Due to obvious confusion caused by my $ sign, I have reworked the code snippets to make them clearer

Quick and easy server control

I use a macports installation of Apache2, PHP5 and MySQl5 for development on my macbooks. This is a great system and really simplifies the installation and setup the utilities.

However, the start/stop commands for each are not added to the PATH by default and it's tough remembering the long paths to the control programs.

But there's a solution:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Make sure that you're in your home folder.
3. Edit (or create) .bash_profile
   
   
   

   $ nano .bash_profile

4. Add aliases for your commands
   
   
   

   alias apache2ctl="sudo /opt/local/apache/bin/apachectl"
   alias mysqlstart="sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5"
   alias mysqlstop="sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 -u root -p shutdown"

5. restart your bash session with
   
   
   

   source ~/.bash_profile

   and you're good to go...

Then you simply issue the following commands from the command line.

apache2ctl start # Start Apache
apache2ctl stop # Stop Apache
apache2ctl graceful # Restart Apache
mysqlstart # Start Mysql
mysqlstop # Stop Mysql