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, 22 for the Java version, macOS for the operating system, and the architecture. Start downloading.

  2. Unzip the archive: 
    tar -xzf graalvm-jdk-<version>_macos-<architecture>.tar.gz

    Alternatively, open the file in the Finder.

  3. 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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 -v22 returns /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/<graalvm>/Contents/Home. You can run /usr/libexec/java_home -v22 -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.