On running mvn-version I get the exception UnsupportedClassVersionError received error How do I solve this

Question

Once Maven is installed, I tried to execute mvn -version and I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/apache/ma

    ven/cli/MavenCli : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0

            at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)

            at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:631)

            at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:615)

            at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141)

            at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283)

            at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58)

            at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197)

            at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)

            at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)

......

I'm running on jdk1.6 and maven-3.3.3.

How do I solve this problem?

Answer 1

This happens because your jdk version is outdated.

From the Maven installation page:

Maven 3.3 requires JDK 1.7 or above, Maven 3.2 requires JDK 1.6 or above, while Maven 3.0/3.1 requires JDK 1.5 or above.

You either need to upgrade your JDK to 7 or higher, or downgrade Maven to the 3.2 version.