/etc/profile not sourced for users

Question

In the ubuntu server I run, I added customisations in /etc/bash.bashrc and as .sh files in /etc/profile.d, to add some useful aliases and functionalities for my users. All of them run correctly for my account.

However, logging into other accounts (including ones in the same groups as mine), be it via su or ssh, these customisations aren't loaded. Manually running . /etc/profile does the trick, but afaik this should happen automatically at startup in interactive login shells. Running echo $0 from all accounts returns -bash, so I assume they effectively are in such shells.

Why else could this be happening, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

I encounter the same problem. I found my solution while checking the /etc/profile file

...
if [ -d /etc/profile.d ]; then
  for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh; do
    if [ -r $i ]; then
      . $i
    fi
  done
  unset i
fi

So it's only check .sh files (Ubuntu 18). I have renamed my /etc/profile.d/conda to /etc/profile.d/conda.sh and now it works as intended!

Answer 2

Anything in ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc is run after /etc/profile and /bash.bashrc. As such, any aliases or variables set in the first will supersede those set in the latter if they share the same name.

For whoever this might help: the specific issue I was facing is because I'm migrating servers, and I've asked my users to backup any important files they had and put it back in the new server. When they did this, they included ~/.bashrc because it had "the trick that makes python work" (i.e. it was setting the PATH variable to include the anaconda directory), as well as some of the customisations I had made to their computers in the previous server. This was in conflict with new aliases I'm setting (e.g. the alias for source activate, which became conda activate), and as of conda 4.4, conda.sh should be added to /etc/profiles.d/ rather than manually setting the PATH variable.