[FIXED] Maven insists JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly, unless I run it as sudo

Issue

Ubuntu 22.04.1, newly updated from 20.04.5.

When I try to build anything with Maven it complains:

$ mvn -v
The JAVA_HOME environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program
NB: JAVA_HOME should point to a JDK not a JRE

I can get results with sudo, though:

$ sudo mvn -v
Apache Maven 3.6.3
Maven home: /usr/share/maven
Java version: 17.0.4, vendor: Private Build, runtime: /usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk-amd64
Default locale: en_GB, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "5.15.0-48-generic", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

I could build fine last week before the update to Ubuntu 22.04; however when trying to build a new project my boss said I'd need to use sudo to build it, so I did. That failed due to Java versions (Maven was insisting on trying to use Java 8), and no matter what I did it wouldn't change to use 17. Until I just removed Java 8 entirely, at which point I started getting the JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly issue.

I've tried uninstalling all of the Java versions as well as Maven and reinstalling. My PATH and JAVA_HOME variables do seem to return correctly:

$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk-amd64
$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/snap/bin:/home/naf/.local/share/JetBrains/Toolbox/scripts:/usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk-amd64/bin

I don't want to mess up projects by building as sudo, but I've no idea where to go with this.

Solution

Maven had a ~/.mavenrc file with its own JAVA_HOME definition pointing to Java 8. Seems that would override the system default. I suppose when using sudo it would ignore the file in my home directory and get the system defaults.

Answered By - Naf
Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (JavaFixing Admin)