Set environment variables on Mac OS X Lion

Question

When someone says  edit your  plist file  or  your  profile  or   bash profile  etc  this just confuses me  I have no idea where these files are  how to create them if I have to do that  etc  and also why there seem to be so many different ones  why  Do they do different things    So could someone please explain very patiently to a previous Windows user  wanting desperately to become more familiar with the pleasant if initially somewhat confusing OS X world  how to do this step by step   I need the variables to be set both for GUI applications and command line applications  and at the moment it s for an ant script that needs the variables  but there will most likely be other needs as well   Please note that I have Lion too  since many of the answers you get Googling seem to be outdated for Lion     Also note that I have practically zero experience using the Terminal  I m willing to learn  but please explain for a novice

User · Answer

echo  PATH   it prints current path value  Then do vim    bash profile and write  export PATH  PATH  new path to be added   here you are appending to the old path  so preserves the old path and adds your new path to it  then do   source    bash profile   this will execute it and add the path  then again check with  echo  PATH

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Unfortunately none of these answers solved the specific problem I had    Here s a simple solution without having to mess with bash  In my case  it was getting gradle to work  for Android Studio     Btw  These steps relate to OSX  Mountain Lion 10 8 5    Open up Terminal  Run the following command   sudo nano  etc paths  or sudo vim  etc paths for vim    Go to the bottom of the file  and enter the path you wish to add  Hit control-x to quit  Enter  Y  to save the modified buffer  Open a new terminal window then type   echo  PATH   You should see the new path appended to the end of the PATH  I got these details from this post   http   architectryan com 2012 10 02 add-to-the-path-on-mac-os-x-mountain-lion   UkED3rxPp3Q  I hope that can help someone else

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Simplified Explanation This post question is kind of old  so I will answer a simplified version for OS X Lion users  By default  OSX Lion does not have any of the following files      bashrc    bash profile    profile  At most  if you ve done anything in the terminal you might see    bash history What It Means You must create the file to set your default bash commands  commonly in    bashrc    To do this  use any sort of editor  though it s more simple to do it within the terminal     gt  emacs  profile  from w in emacs type   source    bashrc  from w in emacs type   Ctrl   x  Ctrl   s  to save the file   from w in emacs type   Ctrl   x  Ctrl   c  to close emacs    gt  emacs  bashrc  from w in emacs type paste all your bash commands  save  and exit   The next time you quit and reload the terminal  it should load all your bash preferences   For good measure  it s usually a good idea to separate your commands into useful file names   For instance  from within    bashrc  you should have a source    bash aliases and put all your alias commands in    bash aliases

User · Answer

What worked for me is to create a  launchd conf with the variables I needed   setenv FOO barbaz   This file is read by launchd at login  You can add a variable  on the fly  to the running launchd using   launchctl setenv FOO barbaz    In fact   launchd cond simply contains launchctl commands   Variables set this way seem to be present in GUI applications properly   If you happen to be trying to set your LANG or LC  variables in this way  and you happen to be using iTerm2  make sure you disable the  Set locale variables automatically  setting under the Terminal tab of the Profile you re using  That seems to override launchd s environment variables  and in my case was setting a broken LC CTYPE causing issues on remote servers  which got passed the variable     The environment plist still seems to work on my Lion though  You can use the RCenvironment preference pane to maintain the file instead of manually editing it or required Xcode  Still seems to work on Lion  though it s last update is from the Snow Leopard era  Makes it my personally preferred method

User · Answer

I had problem with Eclipse  started as GUI  not from script  on Maverics that it did not take custom PATH  I tried all the methods mentioned above to no avail  Finally I found the simplest working answer based on hints from here    Go to  Applications eclipse Eclipse app Contents folder Edit Info plist file with text editor  or XCode   add LSEnvironment dictionary for environment variable with full path  Note that it includes also  usr bin etc    lt dict gt     lt key gt LSEnvironment lt  key gt     lt dict gt           lt key gt PATH lt  key gt           lt string gt  usr bin  bin  usr sbin  sbin  dev android-ndk-r9b lt  string gt     lt  dict gt     lt key gt CFBundleDisplayName lt  key gt     lt string gt Eclipse lt  string gt         Reload parameters for app with   System Library Frameworks CoreServices framework Frameworks LaunchServices fra  mework Support lsregister -v -f  Applications eclipse Eclipse app  Restart Eclipse

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I took the idiot route  Added these to the end of  etc profile  for environment in  find  etc environments d -type f  do         environment done   created a folder  etc environments create a file in it called  oracle  or  whatever  and added the stuff I needed set globally to it    etc  cat  etc environments d Oracle  export PATH  PATH  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 export DYLD LIBRARY PATH  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 export SQLPATH  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 export PATH  PATH  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 export TNS ADMIN  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 network admin

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More detail  which may perhaps be helpful to someone   Due to my own explorations  I now know how to set environment variables in 7 of 8 different ways   I was trying to get an envar through to an application I m developing under Xcode  I set  tracer  envars using these different methods to tell me which ones get it into the scope of my application  From the below  you can see that editing the  scheme  in Xcode to add arguments works  as does  putenv   What didn t set it in that scope     MACOS environment plist  app-specific plist   profile  and adding a build phase to run a custom script  I found another way in Xcode  at least  to set one but forgot what I called the tracer and can t find it now  maybe it s on another machine       GPU DUMP DEVICE KERNEL is 3  GPU DUMP TRK ENVPLIST is  null   GPU DUMP TRK APPPLIST is  null   GPU DUMP TRK DOTPROFILE is  null   GPU DUMP TRK RUNSCRIPT is  null   GPU DUMP TRK SCHARGS is 1  GPU DUMP TRK PUTENV is 1      on the other hand  if I go into Terminal and say  set   it seems the only one it gets is the one from  profile  I would have thought it would pick up environment plist also  and I m sure once I did see a second tracer envar in Terminal  so something s probably gone wonky since then   Long day

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Here s a bit more information specifically regarding the PATH variable in Lion OS 10 7 x   If you need to set the PATH globally  the PATH is built by the system in the following order    Parsing the contents of the file  private etc paths  one path per line Parsing the contents of the folder  private etc paths d  Each file in that folder can contain multiple paths  one path per line  Load order is determined by the file name first  and then the order of the lines in the file  A setenv PATH statement in  private etc launchd conf  which will append that path to the path already built in  1 and  2  you must not use  PATH to reference the PATH variable that has been built so far   But  setting the PATH here is completely unnecessary given the other two options  although this is the place where other global environment variables can be set for all users    These paths and variables are inherited by all users and applications  so they are truly global -- logging out and in will not reset these paths -- they re built for the system and are created before any user is given the opportunity to login  so changes to these require a system restart to take effect    BTW  a clean install of OS 10 7 x Lion doesn t have an environment plist that I can find  so it may work but may also be deprecated

User · Answer

Open Terminal   vi    bash profile   Apply changing to system  no need restart computer    source    bash profile    Also work with macOS Sierra 10 12 1

User · Answer

It is recommended to check default terminal shell before setting any environment variables  via following commands     echo  SHELL  bin zsh   If your default terminal is  bin zsh  Z Shell  like in my case  Personally prefer Z Shell   then you should set these environment variable in    zshenv file with following contents  In this example  setting JAVA HOME environment variable  but same applies to others    export JAVA HOME     usr libexec java home     Similarly  any other terminal type not mentioned above  you should set environment variable in its respective terminal env file

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Step1  open    bash profile  Now a text editor opens    Step2  variable name should be in capitals  in this example variable is NODE ENV  Step3  export NODE ENV development  Save it and close   Restart your system   Done   To check env variable  open terminal and type  echo  NODE ENV

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Setup your PATH environment variable on Mac OS  Open the Terminal program  this is in your Applications Utilites folder by default   Run the following command  touch    bash profile  open    bash profile   This will open the file in the your default text editor   For ANDROID SDK as example    You need to add the path to your Android SDK platform-tools and tools directory  In my example I will use   Development android-sdk-macosx  as the directory the SDK is installed in  Add the following line   export PATH   PATH   Development android-sdk-macosx platform-tools  Development android-sdk-macosx tools   Save the file and quit the text editor  Execute your  bash profile to update your PATH   source    bash profile   Now everytime you open the Terminal program you PATH will included the Android SDK

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Let me illustrate you from my personal example in a very redundant way     First after installing JDK  make sure it s installed   Sometimes macOS or Linux automatically sets up environment variable for you unlike Windows  But that s not the case always  So let s check it    The line immediately after echo  JAVA HOME would be empty if the environment variable is not set  It must be empty in your case   Now we need to check if we have bash profile file    You saw that in my case we already have bash profile  If not we have to create a bash profile file   Create a bash profile file    Check again to make sure bash profile file is there    Now let s open bash profile file  macOS opens it using it s default TextEdit program   This is the file where environment variables are kept  If you have opened a new bash profile file  it must be empty  In my case  it was already set for python programming language and Anaconda distribution  Now  i need to add environment variable for Java which is just adding the first line  YOU MUST TYPE the first line VERBATIM  JUST the first line  Save and close the TextEdit  Then close the terminal    Open the terminal again  Let s check if the environment variable is set up

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Your  profile or  bash profile are simply files that are present in your  home  folder  If you open a Finder window and click your account name in the Favorites pane  you won t see them  If you open a Terminal window and type ls to list files you still won t see them  However  you can find them by using ls -a in the terminal   Or if you open your favorite text editor  say TextEdit since it comes with OS X  and do File- Open and then press Command Shift   and click on your account name  home folder  you will see them as well   If you do not see them  then you can create one in your favorite text editor   Now  adding environment variables is relatively straightforward and remarkably similar to windows conceptually   In your  profile just add  one per line  the variable name and its value as follows   export JAVA HOME  Library Java Home export JRE HOME  Library Java Home   etc   If you are modifying your  PATH  variable  be sure to include the system s default PATH that was already set for you   export PATH  PATH  path to my stuff   Now here is the quirky part  you can either open a new Terminal window to have the new variables take effect  or you will need to type  profile or  bash profile to reload the file and have the contents be applied to your current Terminal s environment   You can check that your changes took effect using the  set  command in your Terminal  Just type set  or set   more if you prefer a paginated list  and be sure what you added to the file is there   As for adding environment variables to GUI apps  that is normally not necessary and I d like to hear more about what you are specifically trying to do to better give you an answer for it

User · Answer

First  one thing to recognize about OS X is that it is built on Unix  This is where the  bash profile comes in  When you start the Terminal app in OS X you get a bash shell by default  The bash shell comes from Unix and when it loads it runs the  bash profile script  You can modify this script for your user to change your settings  This file is located at      bash profile     Update for Mavericks  OS X Mavericks does not use the environment plist - at least not for OS X windows applications  You can use the launchd configuration for windowed applications  The  bash profile is still supported since that is part of the bash shell used in Terminal   Lion and Mountain Lion Only  OS X windowed applications receive environment variables from the your environment plist file  This is likely what you mean by the   plist  file  This file is located at      MacOSX environment plist     If you make a change to your environment plist file then OS X windows applications  including the Terminal app  will have those environment variables set  Any environment variable you set in your  bash profile will only affect your bash shells   Generally I only set variables in my  bash profile file and don t change the  plist file  or launchd file on Mavericks   Most OS X windowed applications don t need any custom environment  Only when an application actually needs a specific environment variable do I change the environment plist  or launchd file on Mavericks    It sounds like what you want is to change the environment plist file  rather than the  bash profile   One last thing  if you look for those files  I think you will not find them  If I recall correctly  they were not on my initial install of Lion   Edit  Here are some instructions for creating a plist file    Open Xcode Select File -  New -  New File    Under Mac OS X select Resources Choose a plist file Follow the rest of the prompts   To edit the file  you can Control-click to get a menu and select Add Row  You then can add a key value pair  For environment variables  the key is the environment variable name and the value is the actual value for that environment variable   Once the plist file is created you can open it with Xcode to modify it anytime you wish

User · Answer

Adding Path Variables to OS X Lion This was pretty straight forward and worked for me  in terminal   echo  quot export PATH  PATH  path to whatever quot   gt  gt   bash profile  replace  quot  path to whatever quot  with the location of what you want to add to your bash profile  i e    echo  quot export PATH  PATH  usr local Cellar nginx 1 0 12 sbin quot   gt  gt   bash profile      bash profile  restart your bash shell  A similar response was here  http   www mac-forums com forums os-x-operating-system 255324-problems-setting-path-variable-lion html post1317516

[macos] Set environment variables on Mac OS X Lion

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