Mac Set Environment Variable Terminal
Mac Os X Set Environment Variable For Applications

launchd.plist is not a file, but rather a type of file. It is an XML document that holds parameters which can be loaded into launchd. Here we’ll see how to use it to set environment variables.

Setting a Variable

For our first example, we’ll set the variable FOO to the value of BAR. Let’s look at an example and we’ll break it down:

Displaying Current Environment & Shell Variables in Mac OS X. To quickly get a list of environmental variables, you can use the following command: printenv. If you want to see a complete list of shell variables, the ‘set’ command can be issued as well: set.
UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X: You can set environment variables at the command line, in an environment configuration file, or in a login file. Windows: You can set environment variables in the system applet or at the command line.

Set the environment variables after IBM Informix installation for any instance other than a demonstration database server created while running the installation application. Setting Informix environment variables (Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X). HowTo: Set an Environment Variable in Mac OS X - launchd.plist Posted by Eric Dowd 2014-10-27T04:38:14+00:00 howto set-environment-variables set-mac-os-x-environment-variables ← Retiring Gentoo in the Cloud AMIs.

Breakdown

We will save in /Library/LaunchDaemons as that is where system-wide daemons provided by the administrator are set up. Other options include:

/Library/LaunchAgents - which is where per-user agents provided by the administrator are setup.
~/Library/LaunchAgents - which is where per-user agents provided by the user are setup.

We’ll name the file setenv.FOO.plist, as the convention is to name the file Label.plist and the label here is setenv.FOO.

Label

The label can be anything, but needs to uniquely identify the job. We’ll use a convention of setenv.VARIABLE_NAME.

ProgramArguments

Mac Set Environment Variable Terminal

Next is the program arguments of the daemon. launchctl is used to set environment variables; it can be used in the terminal to set environment variables. This is what it would look like using the terminal:

Quit the terminal and reopen it

The issue however is if you reboot, you’ll lose the environment variable; fortunately we can put this command into ProgramArguments. ProgramArguments is just an array that lists the arguments for running the program.

RunAtLoad

This tells launchd whether or not to run the job once it is read.

ServiceIPC

This was required in Mac OS X 10.4, but is inferred in Mac OS X 10.5 and later.

Creating the File

We can run the following command in the terminal to create the file.

Load the file

And if we don’t want to log out and back in, we can just run this command in the terminal to set the variable.

Mac Os X Set Environment Variable For Applications

Setting Another Variable

When setting variables with /etc/launchd.conf we couldn’t have spaces in the value, here we can. We’ll set the environment variable BAR to the value TEST SPACES:

Create the File

Load the File

Issues

launchd does not have ordering for loading services, so setting the environment variables will be run concurrently with any programs automatically opening on login. So can either close and reopen those apps that need the variables; login, then logout, then login again; or do not use “Reopen windows when logging back”.

References

Parts of this series

HowTo: Set an Environment Variable in Mac OS X - launchd.plist