How to Get the JDK 6 Source Code onto your Machine

Every now and then I want to get the JDK source code onto a new machine and it always seems to take me longer than I expect it to so this post is an attempt to help future me!

Googling for this takes me to this page and I always think I’ll just checkout the SVN repository and hook that up but it doesn’t seem to be available.

$ wget -S http://java.net/projects/jdk-jrl-sources/
--2012-02-11 09:51:34--  http://java.net/projects/jdk-jrl-sources/
Resolving java.net (java.net)... 192.9.164.103
Connecting to java.net (java.net)|192.9.164.103|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
  Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:51:34 GMT

The alternative is therefore to download the jar provided which we can do like this:

wget http://www.java.net/download/jdk6/6u23/promoted/b05/jdk-6u23-fcs-src-b05-jrl-12_nov_2010.jar

The next step is then to execute the jar which I somehow didn’t realise until I unpacked it and had a look at the README:

java -jar jdk-6u23-fcs-

src

-b05-jrl-12_nov_2010.jar

You get asked to choose a folder location for the sources and then the code is under ‘src/share/classes’. So for me I need to give IntelliJ a source path of :

/Users/mneedham/github/j2se/src/share/classes

You can browse the different versions of the source code by changing the version number at the end of URLs like this one. At the moment version 23 is the latest one available.

From http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/02/11/downloading-the-jdk-6-source-code/