How Do You Troubleshoot the Groovy Error “JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly”?

One of the following situations apply to you:

Problem scenario #1
You try to run a Groovy command (e.g., groovy foobar.groovy), but you get this error:
"groovy: JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly, can not execute: /usr/lib/jvm/java-9-openjdk/bin/java"

Problem scenario #2
You get this error when you run an "hdfs" command:

ERROR: /usr/bin//bin/java is not executable.

What should you do?

Solution

1. Set the JAVA_HOME variable. Run this command: which java
2. Mentally eliminate the trailing "/bin/java" from the above command. If Java was not found, follow these directions to install Java.
3. Draft this command but replace "foobar" with the results of step #2 (with the elimination of "/bin/java" from the end of step #1's results): export JAVA_HOME=foobar
4. Run the drafted command from above.
5. Try to use Groovy again.

If you want the solution to persist a reboot, we recommend rebooting the server and seeing if your original problem is reproducible. Then run a command like this but replace "foobar" with the results of step #2 (with the elimination of "/bin/java" from the end of step #1's results):

echo 'export JAVA_HOME=/foobar' >> ~/.bashrc