Installation on macOS Platforms

Oracle GraalVM is available for macOS on x64 and AArch64 architectures.

Note that on macOS the JDK installation path is: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home.

Follow these steps to install Oracle GraalVM:

  1. Navigate to Oracle Java Downloads. Select the preferred Oracle GraalVM version, 21 for the Java version, macOS for the operating system, and the architecture. Start downloading.

  2. Remove the quarantine attribute (required for macOS Catalina and later): 
     sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture>.tar.gz
  3. Unzip the archive: 
    tar -xzf graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture>.tar.gz

    Alternatively, open the file in the Finder.

  4. Move the downloaded package to its proper location, the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines directory. Since this is a system directory, sudo is required: 
    sudo mv graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture> /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines

    To verify if the move is successful and to get a list of all installed JDKs, run /usr/libexec/java_home -V.

  5. There can be multiple JDKs installed on the machine. The next step is to configure the runtime environment:
    • Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to resolve to the installation directory: 
       export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home
    • Set the value of the PATH environment variable to the GraalVM bin directory: 
       export PATH=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home/bin:$PATH
  6. To check whether the installation was successful, run the java -version command.

Optionally, you can specify Oracle GraalVM as the default JRE or JDK installation in your Java IDE.

Installation Notes

On JAVA_HOME Command

The information property file, Info.plist, is in the top level Contents folder. This means that Oracle GraalVM participates in the macOS-specific /usr/libexec/java_home mechanism. Depending on other JDK 17 installation(s) available, it is now possible that /usr/libexec/java_home -v21 returns /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home. You can run /usr/libexec/java_home -v21 -V to see the complete list of JVMs available to the java_home command. This command sorts the JVMs in decreasing version order and chooses the top one as the default for the specified version. Within a specific version, the sort order appears to be stable but is unspecified.