System wide variables not accessible by System V init scripts

Question

I have a script in /etc/init.d/ called foo.sh that runs six (JAVA) Spring Boot jars. All of the jars require environmental variables to run. This script was added to rc.d via update-rc.d foo.sh defaults. Environmental variables needed were added to /etc/environment/.

Whenever I reboot the server, the script runs but one of the java modules cannot find env variables, the other 5 run correctly. If I try to run the script manually, it has no issues at all. I have ran this a million ways in order to determine if the problem is in the java code, but it is not.

What exactly is happening here and how could I solve it so that on a reboot all jars can access global environmental variables?

Answer 1

I cannot tell you exactly why that's happening but I can suggest a couple things.

You can always create a simple test script in that directory and invoke it the same way as the other jars, that simply displays the environment:

#!/bin/sh
echo "$(env)" >/tmp/env-test

Secondly, you can always prepend any environment variables that you want available to a command, like:

FOO=bar mycommand

This is often useful for temporarily running a command using a variable without having to set it.