Unfortunately in my case this didn’t end up uninstalling an older version of the JDK. It’s a rather manual approach but at least it is documented and the whole procedure consists of three commands. Removing the existing installationįortunately Oracle has uninstall instructions on their website. Oh, and installs the same JDK anyway, just without all the additional pointy clicky work. It’s just so much easier to get updates and update information all in one place. As I move the management of more development tools from manual management over to homebrew, I decided to use homebrew to manage my Java installation also. It was the typical “download from the Oracle website, then manually run the installer” deployment.

I’ve had a ‘manual’ install of JDK 8 on my Mac for quite a while, mainly to run Clojure. If you want to install a specific major version of the JDK (6 or 8 at the time of writing), I describe how to do that in this new blog post. _ Update: The title of this post isn’t quite correct as using the homebrew cask mentioned in this blog post will install the current major version of the Oracle JDK. The installation method described below will still work as it uses the non-versioned java cask, which installs the latest version of OpenJDK. The system will not install a JRE that has an earlier version than the current version.Update II - : It looks like due to the recent licensing changes, the Java 8 JDK that brew used is not directly accessible anymore and likely behind some kind of paywall. When you install the JRE, you can install only one JRE on your system at a time. To install an earlier version of the JRE, you must first uninstall the current version. To determine the current JRE version installed on your system, see Determining the JRE Version Installed on macOS.

However, the system will not replace the current JRE with a lower version.

When you install the JDK, it also installs the JRE. Administrator privileges are required to install the JDK and JRE on macOS. Installing the JDK and JRE on macOS is performed on a systemwide basis for all users. You cannot install Java for a single user. The following are the system requirements for installing the JDK and the JRE on macOS:

Install jdk mac os