How to tell if JRE or JDK is installed

I have one computer that I intentionally installed JDK on. I have another computer with JRE, for, among other things, testing. However, when I got a java application working on this computer, and then tried it on another, it complained that JDK was required. How can I check if JDK was somehow installed on my system? Note: the computer in question is a Mac.

You can open up terminal and simply type

java -version // this will check your jre version
javac -version // this will check your java compiler version if you installed 

this should show you the version of java installed on the system (assuming that you have set the path of the java in system environment).

And if you haven't, add it via

export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/java/jdk1.x

and if you unsure if you have java at all on your system just use find in terminal

i.e. find / -name "java"

Normally a jdk installation has javac in the environment path variables ... so if you check for javac in the path, that's pretty much a good indicator that you have a jdk installed.

@maciej-cygan described the process well, however in order to find your java path:

$ which java

it gives you the path of java binary file which is a linked file in /usr/bin directory. next:

$ cd /usr/bin/ && ls -la | grep java

find the pointed location which is something as follows (for me):

then cd to the pointed directory to find the real home directory for Java. next:

$ ls -la | grep java

which is as follows in this case:

so as it's obvious in the screenshot, my Java home directory is /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64. So accordingly I need to add JAVA_HOME to my bash profile (.bashrc, .bash_profile, etc. depending on your OS) like below:

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64"

Here you go!

A generic, pure Java solution..

For Windows and MacOS, the following can be inferred (most of the time)...

public static boolean isJDK() {
    String path = System.getProperty("sun.boot.library.path");
    if(path != null && path.contains("jdk")) {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

However... on Linux this isn't as reliable... For example...

• Many JREs on Linux contain openjdk the path
• There's no guarantee that the JRE doesn't also contain a JDK.

So a more fail-safe approach is to check for the existence of the javac executable.

public static boolean isJDK() {
    String path = System.getProperty("sun.boot.library.path");
    if(path != null) {
        String javacPath = "";
        if(path.endsWith(File.separator + "bin")) {
            javacPath = path;
        } else {
            int libIndex = path.lastIndexOf(File.separator + "lib");
            if(libIndex > 0) {
                javacPath = path.substring(0, libIndex) + File.separator + "bin";
            }
        }
        if(!javacPath.isEmpty()) {
            return new File(javacPath, "javac").exists() || new File(javacPath, "javac.exe").exists();
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Warning: This will still fail for JRE + JDK combos which report the JRE's sun.boot.library.path identically between the JRE and the JDK. For example, Fedora's JDK will fail (or pass depending on how you look at it) when the above code is run. See unit tests below for more info...

Unit tests:

# Unix
java -XshowSettings:properties -version 2>&1|grep "sun.boot.library.path"
# Windows
java -XshowSettings:properties -version 2>&1|find "sun.boot.library.path"

    # PASS: MacOS AdoptOpenJDK JDK11
    /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/adoptopenjdk-11.jdk/Contents/Home/lib
    
    # PASS: Windows Oracle JDK12
    c:\Program Files\Java\jdk-12.0.2\bin
    
    # PASS: Windows Oracle JRE8
    C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_181\bin
    
    # PASS: Windows Oracle JDK8
    C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_181\bin
    
    # PASS: Ubuntu AdoptOpenJDK JDK11
    /usr/lib/jvm/adoptopenjdk-11-hotspot-amd64/lib

    # PASS: Ubuntu Oracle JDK11
    /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-oracle/lib
    
    # PASS: Fedora OpenJDK JDK8
    /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.141-1.b16.fc24.x86_64/jre/lib/amd64

    #### FAIL: Fedora OpenJDK JDK8
    /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_231-amd64/jre/lib/amd64

according to JAVA documentation, the JDK should be installed in this path:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdkmajor.minor.macro[_update].jdk

See the uninstall JDK part at https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/install/mac_jdk.html

So if you can find such folder then the JDK is installed

> the computer in question is a Mac.

A macOS-only solution:

/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8+ --exec javac -version

Where 1.8+ is Java 1.8 or higher.

Unfortunately, the java_home helper does not set the proper return code, so checking for failure requires parsing the output (e.g. 2>&1 |grep -v "Unable") which varies based on locale.

Note, Java may also exist in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/bin, but at time of writing this, I'm unaware of a JRE that installs there which contains javac as well.