How to install java locally - no root - on linux, if possible?
I need java 1.7 and server has only got 1.6. I have no root privileges. I tried to google out something but it seems like nobody was doing it. Can I somehow compile it or get ready binaries so I could put those into my PATH. Could you help? System is Redhat.
Answer
It is quite easy...
Download the JDK as a tarball from Oracle (a simple google search will yield the link).
Unzip it somewhere in your $HOME (for instance, $HOME/jdk).
Set JAVA_HOME to the path of the root JDK install; then prepend $JAVA_HOME/bin to your PATH.
And off you go.
Here I have a particular setting insofar as I run three different major versions of the JDK: 6, 7, 8. For instance, here is my source file for setting the current shell to use Java 8:
$ cat ~/.jdk/8
export JAVA_HOME=/opt/sunjdk/1.8/current
export PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH"
And in /opt/sunjdk/1.8 (given that /opt/sunjdk is writable by my user hence I don't need to be root):
$ ls -l /opt/sunjdk/1.8/* -d
lrwxrwxrwx 1 fge fge 11 Oct 30 10:09 /opt/sunjdk/1.8/current -> jdk1.8.0_25
drwxr-xr-x 1 fge fge 274 Mar 18 2014 /opt/sunjdk/1.8/jdk1.8.0_05
drwxr-xr-x 1 fge fge 274 Sep 18 02:44 /opt/sunjdk/1.8/jdk1.8.0_25
(and yes, I was root to begin with so as to grant write permissions for /opt/sunjdk to "my" user; if you have no such liberty, just create another directory in your home)