Installing MADS V5

To develop with MADS V5 you need four pieces: the mads command line tool, a JDK, Maven and, for a comfortable workflow, the VS Code extension.

Did you install mads by cloning its Git repository? Remove that install first (the /usr/local/bin/mads link or its bin folder in PATH) so it does not take precedence over the new one.

1. The mads tool

macOS and Linux (Homebrew)

With Homebrew installed:

brew tap sivicomeng/mads
brew trust --formula sivicomeng/mads/mads
brew install mads
mads --version

Recent Homebrew versions only load formulae from third-party taps once you trust them; that is what brew trust does. Homebrew also installs the Java runtime mads needs.

Windows (Scoop)

From a regular PowerShell window (not "Run as administrator"), install Scoop if you don't have it:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
irm get.scoop.sh | iex

Then install mads:

scoop install git
scoop bucket add java
scoop install java/temurin-lts-jdk
scoop bucket add mads https://github.com/sivicomeng/homebrew-mads
scoop install mads/mads
mads --version

Scoop needs Git to add buckets. If you already have a JDK 8 or later, skip the two Java lines.

2. Maven

The module commands (mads module build, test, deploy...) run Maven, which mads finds through the M2_HOME environment variable or the M2_HOME preference in mads --edit.

For example, on macOS add this line to ~/.zshrc:

export M2_HOME="$(brew --prefix maven)/libexec"

3. VS Code extension

Install MADS V5 for Visual Studio Code from the Marketplace, or from the VS Code command palette:

ext install sivicom.mads-extension

The extension adds the Mads view to the Explorer and the Mads: … commands to the palette. Continue with Development in VS Code.

4. Check the installation

mads --version

It shows the platform and tool versions, the latest published version and the install kind. If something is wrong, mads -v --version adds the installed Java versions and the environment variables.

Updating

mads checks for new versions at most every 12 hours and, when one is available, tells you the command:

To turn the check off, for example on continuous integration servers, set MADS_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1.

Choosing the Java version

mads uses the first Java it finds in this order: JAVA_HOME_MADS, java in PATH and JAVA_HOME. To pin a specific JDK, set JAVA_HOME_MADS:

export JAVA_HOME_MADS="$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 21)"