How do I set an environment variable for sudo in MacOS?

Question

I have installed ServiceMix on my machine, and am trying to start it. The startup script is called start.sh. When I did ./start.sh, it gave me a Permission Denied message. So I used sudo ./start.sh, which starts the server fine.

However, it seems to be using Java 7, when I would like to use Java 6 (for various reasons). I looked through the start.sh script and found that it uses the JAVA_HOME variable. So I set my JAVA_HOME to the JDK 6 directory.

However, ServiceMix still uses Java 7.

A Google search revealed that when a command is run with sudo, sudo removes certain environment variables. So I did sudo -E ./start.sh. Again, it used JDK 7.

I opened the start.sh and added a line, echo $JAVA_HOME to see whether the variable is set properly or not. The output of echo was an empty line.

I tried modifying the /etc/sudoers file to include Defaults env_keep += "JAVA_HOME". Executing start.sh now tells me that my echo statement is again an empty line. ServiceMix still uses JDK 7.

I tried setting JAVA_HOME in /etc/profile. Executing start.sh now tells me that my echo statement is again an empty line. Again, ServiceMix uses JDK 7.

What mistake am I doing here?

FWIW, am on Mac OS X 10.8.2. echo $SHELL on my terminal returns /bin/bash. When I use sudo su and fire echo $SHELL, it returns /bin/sh.

Answer 1

I would suggest you to try out the following steps:

1. Inside /etc/profile.d directory, create a file named set_java_path.sh file containing the line

   export JAVA_HOME=<_complete_path_to_java6_directory_>

2. Run bash command once to make the above change to load. And run the start.sh script.

Edit:

If the /etc/profile.d directory doesn't exist, create a directory names same (permission: 0755 & owner and group as root) and inside your /etc/profile file, add the following code:

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

Answer 2

To preserve your environment variables as sudoer add Defaults env_keep += PATH to your sudoer file (sudo visudo).