mvnd - the Maven Daemon

If SDKMAN! supports your operating system, it is as easy as

If you used the manual install in the past, please make sure that the settings in ~/.m2/mvnd.properties still make sense. With SDKMAN!, the ~/.m2/mvnd.properties file is typically not needed at all, because both JAVA_HOME and MVND_HOME are managed by SDKMAN!.

Note: There are two formulae: mvnd installs the preview 2.x version (embedding Maven 4.0.x), and mvnd@1 installs the stable 1.x version (embedding Maven 3.9.x).

We’re looking for contribution to support Chocolatey, Scoop or asdf. If you fancy helping us…​

Optionally, you can set up completion as follows:

bash is the only shell supported at this time.

• Download the latest ZIP suitable for your platform from https://downloads.apache.org/maven/mvnd/

• Unzip to a directory of your choice

• Add the bin directory to PATH

• Optionally, you can create ~/.m2/mvnd.properties and set the java.home property in case you do not want to bother with setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

• Test whether mvnd works:

  $ mvnd --version
  Maven Daemon 0.0.11-linux-amd64 (native)
  Terminal: org.jline.terminal.impl.PosixSysTerminal with pty org.jline.terminal.impl.jansi.osx.OsXNativePty
  Apache Maven 3.6.3 (cecedd343002696d0abb50b32b541b8a6ba2883f)
  Maven home: /home/ppalaga/orgs/mvnd/mvnd/daemon/target/maven-distro
  Java version: 11.0.1, vendor: AdoptOpenJDK, runtime: /home/data/jvm/adopt-openjdk/jdk-11.0.1+13
  Default locale: en_IE, platform encoding: UTF-8
  OS name: "linux", version: "5.6.13-200.fc31.x86_64", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

  If you are on macOS, you’ll need to remove the quarantine flags from all the files after unpacking the archive:

The daemon runs on Java 17 or later. The bin/mvnd native client is built with GraalVM native-image for four platforms; on any other platform, bin/mvnd.sh (bin/mvnd.cmd on Windows) runs the Java client instead. The daemon also loads mvndnative, a small JNI library for setenv, chdir and macOS memory information, which is prebuilt for the platforms in the following table. The last column lists the Java 17 or later builds that vendors published as of October 2026.

On Linux, the native client links to the system C library dynamically and needs glibc 2.12 or later on x86_64, or glibc 2.17 or later on aarch64; the release workflow checks both limits. When the native client cannot load, for example on an older glibc, bin/mvnd.sh runs the Java client instead.

A native client takes its glibc requirement from the system that builds it, not from GraalVM: GraalVM’s own static libraries need nothing newer than glibc 2.17. Built on Ubuntu 24.04 without the release workflow’s adjustments, the client needs glibc 2.34; built inside AlmaLinux 8, it needs only glibc 2.17 on aarch64. AlmaLinux 8 needs the zlib-static package from its powertools repository for the build.

• git

• Maven

• Download and unpack GraalVM CE from GitHub

• Set JAVA_HOME to where you unpacked GraalVM in the previous step. Check that java -version output is as expected:

  $ $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version
  openjdk version "11.0.9" 2020-10-20
  OpenJDK Runtime Environment GraalVM CE 20.3.0 (build 11.0.9+10-jvmci-20.3-b06)
  OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM GraalVM CE 20.3.0 (build 11.0.9+10-jvmci-20.3-b06, mixed mode, sharing)

• Install the native-image tool:

  $ $JAVA_HOME/bin/gu install native-image

• native-image may require additional software to be installed depending on your platform - see the native-image documentation.

Please note that if you are using Windows as your operating system you will need the following prerequisites for building maven-mvnd: a version of Visual Studio with the workload "Desktop development with C++" and the individual component "Windows Universal CRT SDK".

Then you can simply add [target-dir]/bin to your PATH and run mvnd.

We’re happy to improve mvnd, so feedback is most welcome!