In addition to installing the JDK, you'll need to install either the Maven or Gradle build systems in your shell.

In both cases, you'll want to first activate devbox shell before generating your Maven or Gradle projects, so that the tools use the right version of the JDK for creating your project.

Example Repo

devbox add jdk binutils, or in your devbox.json

  "packages": [
    "jdk@latest",
    "binutils@latest"
  ],

This will install the latest version of the JDK. To find other installable versions of the JDK, run devbox search jdk.

Other distributions of the JDK (such as OracleJDK and Eclipse Temurin) are available in Nixpkgs, and can be found using NixPkg Search

Example Repo

Maven is an all-in-one CI-CD tool for building testing and deploying Java projects. To setup a sample project with Java and Maven in devbox follow the steps below:

1. Create a dummy folder: dummy/ and call devbox init inside it. Then add the nix-pkg: devbox add jdk and devbox add maven.
   • Replace jdk with the version of JDK you want. Get the exact nix-pkg name from search.nixos.org.
2. Then do devbox shell to get a shell with that jdk nix pkg.
3. Then do: mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.devbox.mavenapp -DartifactId=devbox-maven-app -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DarchetypeVersion=1.4 -DinteractiveMode=false
   • In the generated pom.xml file, replace java version in <maven.compiler.source> with the specific version you are testing for.
4. mvn package should compile the package and create a target/ directory.
5. java -cp target/devbox-maven-app-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar com.devbox.mavenapp.App should print "Hello World!".
6. Add target/ to .gitignore.

An example devbox.json would look like the following:

{
  "packages": [
    "maven",
    "jdk",
    "binutils"
  ],
  "shell": {
    "init_hook": null
  }
}