What are correct places for:
- Global environment variables meant to affect all users?
- User-specific environment variables?
To add to sagarchalise's answer, I can summarize what the link suggests as appropriate places for settings.
/etc/environment
/etc/profile
or /etc/bash.bashrc
From the page:
/etc/environment
[...] is specifically meant for system-wide environment variable settings. It is not a script file, but rather consists of assignment expressions, one per line. Specifically, this file stores the system-wide locale and path settings.
Using /etc/profile
is a very Unix-y way to go, but its functionality is greatly reduced under Ubuntu. It exists only to point to /etc/bash.bashrc
and to collect entries from /etc/profile.d
.
On my system, the only interesting entry entry in profile.d is /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh
.
The Ubuntu page recommends ~/.pam_environment
, which is loaded by the PAM system when your session is started (TTY, GUI, SSH, etc.). It is the user-equivalent of /etc/environment
and uses the same syntax. The link suggests alternatives if that doesn't work:
~/.profile
for most shells. This file may also be applied to your GUI session by the display manager, but this need not be the case for all display managers or display servers (X11 vs Wayland) or sessions.And bash-specific:
~/.bash_profile
or ~./bash_login
- If one of these exists, bash executes it instead of ~/.profile
when bash is started as a login shell. Bash will prefer ~/.bash_profile
to ~/.bash_login
. [...] These files won't influence a graphical session by default."~/.bashrc
- "... may be the easiest place to set variables". /etc/environment
and when? It doesn't seem to work with cron, even when using SHELL=/bin/bash
Mar 11, 2013 at 10:49
/etc/environment
like JAVA_HOME="/opt/java"
and ANT_HOME="/opt/ant"
how to do it
Nov 16, 2016 at 4:53
I think the community wiki page on environment variables will help you sort out
You've got:
/etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1)) and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), ...).
which in Lucid and Maverick run
/etc/profile.d/*.sh
if present, and if the user's shell is bash:
/etc/bash.bashrc
For user environment, there is a confusing array specific to the shell and whether it is considered a "login shell". If the shell is bash:
~/.bash_profile
The personal initialization file, executed for login shells
~/.bashrc
The individual per-interactive-shell startup file
for sh/dash:
$HOME/.profile
for zsh, I'm not even going to try to make sense of this.
As recommended on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables:
Global environment variables meant to affect all users should go in /etc/environment
.
User-specific environment variables should be set in ~/.pam_environment
.
Avoid the profile and rc files for setting environment variables on Ubuntu. They have caused me more headaches than they are worth.
This is easier said than done however ;)
It is possible that you may run into the same configuration gap that existed for me. See the workaround for encrypted home below.
~/.pam_environment
:PATH DEFAULT=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:${HOME}/bin
IDEA_JDK DEFAULT=${HOME}/Applications/jdk
Why the ugly static path? ${PATH}
would not work for me. I bricked my login several times trying to work around it so I am sticking with the ugly static copy of the defaults :)
In Ubuntu releases up to and including Precise 12.04 Beta 2, if you are using an encrypted home directory you will need to modify /etc/pam.d/common-session
to get it to load ~/.pam_environment
. This solution apparently works for earlier releases, but I have not tested it.
This seems to be an issue with encrypted home directories. I added
session required pam_env.so
at the end of /etc/pam.d/common-session and now ~/.pam_environment gets read. On another system without encrypted home directories (also 10.04) the work around is not needed. Perhaps in my case the system tries to read ~/.pam_environment before it is decrypted.
Adapted from my answer on Super User: https://superuser.com/a/408373/66856
${HOME}
won't work either. There is no expansion in .pam_environment
.
.pam_environment
, but HOME
isn't set that early usually. If that line had read DEFAULT=${PATH}/Applications/jdk
, you'd have seen the value of PATH
inserted in it.