Environment variables in Eclipse

I am able to run a sample hadoop program from the command prompt and am trying to run the same program from Eclipse, so that I can debug it and understand it better.

For the command line program, some environment variables are set in the .bashrc and the same are being read as System.getenv().get("HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME") in the hadoop program. But, when I am running a java program with System.getenv().get("HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME"), from Eclipse I am getting null.

I tried passing -DHADOOP_MAPRED_HOME=test to VM parameters in the runtime configurations from Eclipse, but still getting null in the standalone program. How to make the environment variables visible within Eclipse? When I iterate through System.getenv() in Eclipse, I see lot of variables like DISPLAY, USER, HOME and others. Where are they set? I am using Ubuntu 11.04.

Solution 1:

You can also define an environment variable that is visible only within Eclipse.

Go to Run -> Run Configurations... and Select tab "Environment".

There you can add several environment variables that will be specific to your application.

Solution 2:

I've created an eclipse plugin for this, because I had the same problem. Feel free to download it and contribute to it.

It's still in early development, but it does its job already for me.

https://github.com/JorisAerts/Eclipse-Environment-Variables