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Please note that I have Lion too, since many of the answers you get Googling seem to be outdated for Lion...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...

Answer 1

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 

Answer 2

Adding Path Variables to OS X Lion

This was pretty straight forward and worked for me, in terminal:

$echo "export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/whatever" >> .bash_profile #replace "/path/to/whatever" with the location of what you want to add to your bash profile, i.e: $ echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.0.12/sbin" >> .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

Answer 3

Let me illustrate you from my personal example in a very redundant way.

1. First after installing JDK, make sure it's installed.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Create a bash_profile file.

5. Check again to make sure bash_profile file is there.

6. Now let's open bash_profile file. macOS opens it using it's default TextEdit program.

7. 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.

8. Open the terminal again. Let's check if the environment variable is set up.