How do I get maven to recognize my jdk version?

I'm on OSx (El Capitain) and I have Java 8 running

> ${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java -version
java version "1.8.0_60"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_60-b27)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.60-b23, mixed mode)

As outlined in this separate answer, I needed to my java version to maven using the maven compiler plugin.

So I added the below to pom.xml, using the jdk.version placeholder

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.3</version>
      <configuration>
        <source>${jdk.version}</source>
        <target>${jdk.version}</target>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

However, I'm stilling getting the below error when running mvn jetty:run

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:3.3:compile (default-compile) on project spark-example: Compilation failure
[ERROR] /Users/abhishek/git/abhishek/spark-example/src/main/java/Main.java:[5,34] lambda expressions are not supported in -source 1.5
[ERROR] (use -source 8 or higher to enable lambda expressions)

I'm aware I could hard-code 1.8 in place of the jdk.version, but I feel like I've seen this used without issue in other projects.

Is there something I'm missing there, or any specific reason this doesn't work?

Thanks!

Solution

I think that you want to use the property ${jdk.version}, but it was not defined in pom.

Try to add code below in you pom.xml:

<properties>
  <jdk.version>1.8</jdk.version>
</properties>

Please refer to properties in pom.