Buiding Hadoop with Eclipse / Maven - Missing artifact jdk.tools:jdk.tools:jar:1.6

The problem is in the Eclipse Maven support, the related question is here.

Under Eclipse, the java.home variable is set to the JRE that was used to start Eclipse, not the build JRE. The default system JRE from C:\Program Files doesn't include the JDK so tools.jar is not being found.

To fix the issue you need to start Eclipse using the JRE from the JDK by adding something like this to eclipse.ini (before -vmargs!):

-vm
C:/<your_path_to_jdk170>/jre/bin/server/jvm.dll

Then refresh the Maven dependencies (Alt-F5) (Just refreshing the project isn't sufficient).

jdk.tools:jdk.tools (or com.sun:tools, or whatever you name it) is a JAR file that is distributed with JDK. Usually you add it to maven projects like this:

<dependency>
    <groupId>jdk.tools</groupId>
    <artifactId>jdk.tools</artifactId>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

See, the Maven FAQ for adding dependencies to tools.jar

Or, you can manually install tools.jar in the local repository using:

mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=jdk.tools -DartifactId=jdk.tools -Dpackaging=jar -Dversion=1.6 -Dfile=tools.jar -DgeneratePom=true

and then reference it like Cloudera did, using:

<dependency>
    <groupId>jdk.tools</groupId>
    <artifactId>jdk.tools</artifactId>
    <version>1.6</version>
</dependency>

thanks to npe, adding

<dependency>
    <groupId>jdk.tools</groupId>
    <artifactId>jdk.tools</artifactId>
    <version>1.7.0_05</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${JAVA_HOME}/lib/tools.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

to pom.xml did the trick.