MacOS – In Mountain Lion how to set, in one place, the PATH environment variable for all newly launched applications

environment-variablesmacospath

On Ask Different there are many questions regarding the PATH environment variable and how to set it for applications launched by a shell, by spotlight or via the finder (typical questions: How to set PATH for Finder-launched applications or How to change PATH environment variable…).

Answers range from sh startup scripts to /etc/paths to /etc/launchd.conf. Here I am after the answer for a unified setting of PATH for all apps under Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2.

Best Answer

After many trials with different options I conclude:

Is there a unified way to set the PATH for applications launched by different means (like shell script, Finder and Spotlight)? Well, yes and no:

No: Setting PATH in shell start up scripts (e.g. .bashrc) works only for apps launched by shells.
No: Setting PATH for the current launchd process via launchctl setenv PATH <...> does not work for me at all.
Yes: Setting PATH in /etc/launchd.conf (and restarting the system) will make the appropriate PATH visible in applications launched by Spotlight, Dock and Finder and subsequently (local) shells.
No: Remotely invoked shells do not inherit the environment. (See ...why do remote shells via ssh do NOT inherit the environment..)

Notes for set-up of shells:

For correct functioning in local shells it is important to switch off the use of /usr/libexec/path_helper, because the default paths in /etc/paths might change the order of the paths in PATH.**
To accommodate remote shells you need to re-import the launchd environment into the shell. Use something like this in your .bashrc:

# the vexatious path stuff
eval $(launchctl export)

Unfortunate consequences of the whole issue are:

No way to have these unified settings on a per user basis. (~/.launchd.conf does not work.)
No easy way to construct the PATH from different sources using techniques like home directory expansion et al.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to set PATH for Finder-launched applications

If you are on 10.7 and not 10.8, the solution below works well:

I had the same problem with eclipse, but now I've added e.g. the following to my .bash_profile and then it worked.

export PATH=some_path:another_path
launchctl setenv PATH $PATH

In case you want to leave the original path intact use

p=$(launchctl getenv PATH)
launchctl setenv PATH /my/new/path:$p

instead (or just launchctl setenv PATH /my/new/path:$(launchctl getenv PATH)).

Note: Changing the launchctl PATH will not take effect until the Dock is "restarted". A new Dock process will automatically start after the current one is killed with the command:

killall Dock

MacOS – In Mountain Lion why do remote shells via ssh do NOT inherit the environment of the launchd parent process

I've looked for an answer too and eventually found a related answer to this question, How to set system-wide environment variables on OS X Mavericks.

It is a security measure, particularly to ensure secure shell users with a disabled shell, where SHELL is set to /bin/false, cannot gain unsolicited access.

One workaround is settting PermitUserEnvironment in your ssh config; please read security caveats in above mentioned answer before doing this.