Apache Hive and java.lang.ClassCastException on start

A couple of days ago I installed Hive from Homebrew on my Mac. Sadly, when I tried to run the hive command, I got the weird-looking error

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException:   
  class jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader   
   cannot be cast to   
  class java.net.URLClassLoader   
  (jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader   
    and   
  java.net.URLClassLoader are in module java.base of loader 'bootstrap')

That looked like a JVM incompatibility, so I switched from GraalVM (the one I use by default) to Java 8 (I have aliases jgrce, jgree, j8 and j11 to switch JVMs). Still, the same error regardless. Weird. Maybe Java 11 (the other JVM I have installed)? Nope, same error.

A quick Googling confirmed that this was related to Hive picking up Java 11, but only working with 7, 8 or 9 (not sure about 9). This in turn is due to the Hive boot scripts looking for the latest JRE which is at least 7, like the hive command here:

JAVA_HOME="$(/usr/libexec/java_home --version 1.7+)" \   
HIVE_HOME="/usr/local/Cellar/hive/3.1.1/libexec" exec \  
"/usr/local/Cellar/hive/3.1.1/libexec/bin/hive" "$@"

This will pick 11, which no longer has URLClassLoader (I think this was changed in Java 9). So, won’t start.

Sadly the only reasonable fix is modifying the scripts after installation, unless you want to just uninstall Java > 1.8. For me this was not an option, so I just modified the scripts by removing the JAVA_HOME condition (since I set my JAVA_HOME globally when I switch between JVMs). And crossing fingers to remember I did so next time I upgrade HomeBrew.

• Data
•  Mac
• Big data
• Hive