Synchronize OS X environment variables for command line and GUI applications from a single source
On OS X, command line applications and GUI applications are treated differently. (Well this can be put in a more technically correct manner but this is what you experience from a user's point of view.) One fundamental difference is that although it's straightforward to feed command line applications with environment variables, it's not so for GUI applications. It's even harder to feed both types of applications from a single source of definitions. (Well, one particular workaround is launching GUI applications from command line.) Moreover, OS X's relevant means for setting up environment variables (or initializing programs in general) have been changing over time in consecutive releases which makes the situation worse. Hundreds of topics at Stack Overflow is the living proof of this mess.
osx-env-sync provides a simple and effective solution for synchronizing environment variables for both command line and GUI applications from a single source. Unlike many other solutions/workarounds provided at Stack Overflow and many blogs, osx-env-sync is simple and works with the latest version of OS X. (Tested on version 10.10.5.)
The original version (from ersiner/osx-env-sync parsed your ~/.bash_profile
for lines starting with export and used those to run launchctl setenv against each line discovered.
This version runs a bash or zsh shell in login + interactive mode, and gets that to run the env command.
It parses the output of this into a version of your environment, and runs launchctl setenv on each env var.
There are also two options: one written in Go (in the osx-env-sync/ sub-dir) and another written in Ruby.
The Go version is more-correct in a lot of ways, but requires Go to be installed on your machine to compile the code. The Ruby version should be able to use the version of Ruby that's installed in macOS as standard -- but there's no reason a more recent version shouldn't work with minimal tweaking.
You can run the make in the root dir, that will run against the included Makefile.
This will install the Go version, if Go is installed, otherwise
fall-back to the Ruby version.
It will assume the $SHELL env-var contains your preferred shell, but will then fall-back to using zsh.
The setting can be further overridden in a config file.
The Go version can parse a Config file named .osx-env-sync.toml and read a few items from that:
- debug -- Whether to produce debug output
- noop -- Don't actually run the commands, therefore don't apply any changes
- shell -- Override the default Shell
And run the script whenever you want to reload your environment variables:
osx-env-sync-now
Finally make sure that you relaunch your already running applications (including Terminal.app) to make them aware of the changes.
The setup is persistent. It will survive restarts and relogins.
On OS X, each Terminal.app session (window or tab) is accompanied with your configured login shell, /bin/bash by default.
During bash login shell startup, the following files are sourced in order:
/etc/profile/etc/bashrc~/.bash_profile
During zsh login, it's:
/etc/zshenv~/.zshenv/etc/zprofile~/.zprofile/etc/zshrc~/.zshrc/etc/zlogin~/.zlogin
NB: The more-complicated style from zsh was part of why I rewrote this to extract it from a shell that was running in login + interactive mode.
These files are sourced upon user login as well. But before these files, there is another type of script (well, there are
others too) executed on behalf of the user: Launch Agents.
osx-env-sync provides a launch agent which initializes a login shell and then uses launchctl command to set
environment variables for the whole user session.
A script helps the launch agent by parsing ~/.bash_profile just for reading the names of the environment variables;
values of the variables are already effective in the launch agent execution environment as the shell script is run with
a login shell by the agent.
While /etc/profile is being sourced (for bash) /usr/libexec/path_helper program is executed to set initial values
of $PATH and $MANPATH environment variables.
The program processes /etc/paths file as well as /etc/paths.d/ and /etc/manpaths.d/ directories for bootstrapping
the variables. You can also edit contents of these files and directories for system wide effect.