Removing Java 8 JDK from Mac

So I installed the beta of JDK 8 a while ago to look at some of the examples. I thought for sure by now, it's easy to change between versions.

Doing some Play development with IntelliJ. For some reason, IntelliJ is compiling with 8 even though:

• I have the compiler set in Preferences to use 1.6
• Supposedly it's using SBT through external build, but sbt from the command line works
• JAVA_HOME is pointing to JDK 6.

If I go to the Java Preferences page, it does show 8 installed, but there is no option to uninstall it and it doesn't see any of the other versions.

When I do which java, it tells me /usr/bin/java and I do /usr/bin/java -version and it returns 1.6.

Note: with a little fiddling, you can use IntelliJ and JDK7, see here.

Solution 1:

I was able to unistall jdk 8 in mavericks successfully doing the following steps:

Run this command to just remove the JDK

sudo rm -rf /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk<version>.jdk

Run these commands if you want to remove plugins

sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/JavaControlPanel.prefPane
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchAgents/com.oracle.java.Java-Updater.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.oracle.java.JavaUpdateHelper
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.oracle.java.Helper-Tool.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.oracle.java.Helper-Tool.plist

Solution 2:

You just need to use these commands

sudo rm -rf /Library/Java/*
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/Java*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Java*

Solution 3:

Managing Java versions on Mac OSX is a nightmare. I recently switched over to using JDK 1.7, deleting JDK 6 from my MacBook entirely (I also had traces of JDK 5 - this laptop has been updated a few times).

Here's what I did to move to JDK 7.

1) download the latest from Oracle (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html) and install it.

2) Remove (using rm - if you've got backups, you can revert if you make a mistake) all the JDK6 and JRE6 files.

At this stage, you should see:

% ls /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/
jdk1.7.0_nn.jdk

(and nothing else)

3) In the folder /Library/Java/Extensions/, you'll need to remove all the old jar files, the ones that correspond to other releases of Java. If you don't, you'll get the infamous message about the wrong version of tools.jar (see Builds failing after upgrading to Java7, Missing Tools.jar and bad class versions). It is not enough to rename the jar files, because Java will open every jar in that folder - I moved mine into a sub-directory. It's safe to remove them once you know everything else works.

I haven't found I need to set JAVA_HOME for simple things.

Note: I just tried running IntelliJ and it will not start unless you have Apple's JDK 6 installed (see http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-93710). Same is true for Eclipse. Netbeans works fine.

Solution 4:

Use /usr/libexec/java_home ; I found these alias and function to be pretty useful in my ~/.profile:

alias java_ls='/usr/libexec/java_home -V 2>&1 | cut -s -d , -f 1 | cut -c 5-'
function java_use() {
    export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v $1)
    java -version
}

Solution 5:

I nuked everything Java, JDK, and oracle. I was running Java 8 on OSX El Capitan

Other answers were missing tons of stuff. This answer covers a lot more bases.

Good bye, shovelware.

sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/JavaControlPanel.prefPane
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchAgents/com.oracle.java.Java-Updater.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.oracle.java.Helper-Tool.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.oracle.java.Helper-Tool.plist
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.oracle.jdk8u65.bom
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.oracle.jdk8u65.plist
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.oracle.jre.bom
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.oracle.jre.plist
sudo rm -rf /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.oracle.javadeployment.plist
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.oracle.java.JavaAppletPlugin.plist
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.oracle.javadeployment.plist
sudo rm -rf ~/.oracle_jre_usage