Warning

This documentation is for SDK 5. The latest major version is SDK 6. SDK 5 is in maintenance mode since the release of SDK 5.8.0. Consequently, as stated in the SDK End User License Agreement (EULA), the SDK will reach the end of its life by July 2028. Contact our support team for assistance with migrating to the new SDK, or your sales representative if you require an extension of SDK maintenance as a service.

Install Portable SDK Distribution

The portable package allows you to install the SDK Distribution when the use of the SDK Distribution installer is not possible or not desired, for example:

you do not have administrator privileges on your workstation;
you want to install SDK Distribution 23.07 but JDK 11 is not your default JDK version;
you want to install SDK Distribution up to 21.11 but JDK 8 is not your default JDK version.

Perform the following steps:

Download the Portable SDK Distribution for your operating system:

SDK Distribution	JDK Version	Windows	Linux	macOS x86_64 (Intel chip)	macOS aarch64 (M1 chip) [1]
`24.01`	`11`	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)
`23.07`	`11`	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)
`21.11`	`8`	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	Portable (.zip)	N/A

Once downloaded, extract the zip file in a local directory of your choice
Edit the MicroEJ-SDK.ini file
Configure the path to the JDK version indicated above by adding the option -vm at the beginning of the file. If you don’t have any JDK installed, see the Get JDK section.
```
 -vm
 [path_to_jdk]/bin
 -startup
 plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.6.400.v20210924-0641.jar
 ...
```
Start the SDK by executing MicroEJ-SDK.exe on Windows or MicroEJ-SDK on Linux or macOS.

Once the SDK is started, it is recommended to check if updates are available (see Update SDK Version section). If your are running SDK on Windows OS, it is also strongly recommended to configure Windows defender exclusion rules.