Time for action – installing the Maven build tool

Many build tools are available for building a Java project. We are going to use Maven 3.2.1 as our build tool. Let's take a look at how we can install Maven:

1. Go to Maven's download page by entering the following URL on your browser:

   http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi

2. Click on the apache-maven-3.2.1-bin.zip download link, and start the download.
3. Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and extract the .zip file into a convenient directory of your choice.
4. Now we need to create one more environment variable, called M2_HOME, in a way that is similar to the way in which we created JAVA_HOME. Enter the extracted Maven zip directory's path as the value for the M2_HOME environment variable.
5. Create one more environment variable, called M2, with the value %M2_HOME%\bin, as shown in the following screenshot:
   

   Setting the M2 environment variable

6. Finally append the M2 variable to the PATH environment variable as well by simply appending the;%M2% text to the PATH variable's value.

Now we have installed the Maven build tool in our computer. To verify whether our installation has been carried out correctly, we need to follow steps that are similar to the Java installation verification. Open a new command window, type mvn –version, and press Enter; you will see the following details of the Maven version:

C:\>mvn -version
Apache Maven 3.2.1 (ea8b2b07643dbb1b84b6d16e1f08391b666bc1e9; 2014-02-14T12:37:52-05:00)
Maven home: C:\Program Files\apache-maven-3.2.1
Java version: 1.7.0_51, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\jre
Default locale: en_SG, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows 7", version: "6.1", arch: "amd64", family: "windows"