Macos – How to set environment variables for GUI apps in OS X Mavericks

environment-variablesguijavamacososx-mavericks

I've been struggling to get an app to run in OS X Mavericks. I finally was able to get it to run by drilling into the .app bundle and running the shell script directly. It seems that JAVA_HOME needed to be set. So I set it in my .profile in the shell, and everything works fine.

However, if I want to simply click the icon in the dock, it won't run. My guess is that this is because JAVA_HOME is not set globally. Since I'm not running the app directly from the shell, OS X doesn't know what JAVA_HOME is. It just keeps looking.

In previous versions of OS X, it seems that environment variables could be set for GUI apps by simply adding them to /etc/launchd.conf. This file doesn't seem to exist in Mavericks. How can I set a global environment variable that will work for GUI apps in Mavericks?

Best Answer

/etc/launchd.conf has never existed by default, but it does still work in 10.9.

Run for example sudo nano /etc/launchd.conf.
Add a line like setenv JAVA_HOME /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home. (I don't know what JAVA_HOME should actually be set to though.)
Either restart or run launchctl < /etc/launchd.conf; sudo launchctl < /etc/launchd.conf and relaunch processes.

launchctl export prints variables exported by the user launchd process and sudo launchctl export prints variables exported by the root launchd process.

This method can also be used to set a default path. For example I have added this line to /etc/launchd.conf:

setenv PATH /Users/lauri/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/libexec:/usr/texbin

(I used /Users/lauri/bin instead of ~/bin because ~/bin would be /var/root/bin for programs run as root.)

Related Solutions

Windows – Set and Get Environment Variables from Command Prompt

To make the environment variable accessible globally you need to set it in the registry. As you've realised by just using:

set NEWVAR=SOMETHING

you are just setting it in the current process space.

According to this page you can use the setx command:

setx NEWVAR SOMETHING

setx is built into Windows 7, but for older versions may only be available if you install the Windows Resource Kit

Debian – Setting environment variables in Linux for all processes

Processes (including shells) only inherit variables from their parents. There is no way to change them from the outside thereafter.

Set "global variables" as early in the boot (for system processes) or shell invocation (for user processes) as possible, or resign yourself to setting them in multiple places.

This may seem like a pain, but the ability to change another processes environment would be a bug, and would introduce all kinds of nasty race conditions.

What are you trying to do that you want "global" environment variables? There may be way to work around your problem.

Workaround:: Write a minimal script in your favorite shell format that only sets the variable you want and put it in a globally accessible place:

/etc/loglocaltion.sh:

export MY_LOG_DIR=/opt/share/mylog
export MY_DEFAULT_LOG_LEVEL=URGENT

and for everything that you want to use that configuration do one of

launch it from shell which has sourceed loglocation.sh in it's non-interactive login file (the one that gets read for all instances of the shell, i.e. .bash_profile).
write a minimal wrapper script which sources loglocation.sh before launching the real program. launchcorelogger.sh:

 CORELOGGER=/opt/sbin/mycorelogger
 source /etc/loglocation.sh
 exec $CORELOGGER

and have init run the script.

Now edits to the loglocation script will effect all associated processing if your run them from a fresh shell in the first case or restart them using you systems dameon restarted (/etc/init.d/mycorelogger restart or whatever).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Set and Get Environment Variables from Command Prompt

Debian – Setting environment variables in Linux for all processes

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