How do I set environment variables?
I'm trying to set up Apache Tomcat on my pc, and it wants me to set up an environment variable for CATALINA_HOME. Does any know how to do this?
Solution 1:
In bash you can set variables like this:
export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/catalina
most other shells follow this convention, but not all. You can set it permanently in ~/.profile for bash (and as before, other shells have other locations)
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables
- Where to declare environment variables?
Solution 2:
To set permanent environment variables in latest Ubuntu versions (from 14.04 and above)
add the variables to /etc/environment. For that follow the below instructions,
Open the terminal and run
sudo -H gedit /etc/environment
the provide your password, then in the prompted text file
then add the variables like
ANT_HOME="/opt/ANT/"
Sample of the /etc/environment is given below
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"
JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/"
AXIS2_HOME="/opt/axis2-1.7.4/"
ANT_HOME="/opt/apache-ant-1.9.7/"
don't forget to logout and login again to enable the environment variables.
Solution 3:
Environment variables should already work
If you are using the tomcat6 package from the Ubuntu repositories, then the CATALINA_HOME and other environment variables are already set, in the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 startup script.
If you are installing tomcat outside the package manager (hopefully in /opt or somewhere else outside the managed file system), then running the TOMCAT/bin/startup.sh should use the relative location to define the CATALINA_HOME.
Setting the Environment variable
If for some reason you still need to set an environment variable you can open a terminal window and type in the command:
export CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat
This environment variable will now work within that terminal window, but if you open another window or logout/login you loose that setting.
Make the environment variable permanent
To make the environment variable setting permanent, there are several places you can define the setting.
To be really sure the setting is being picked up, add the above setting to one of the startup script for tomcat:
yourtomcatfolder/bin/startup.sh
yourtomcatfolder/bin/catalina.sh
Note: startup.sh calls the catalina.sh. You should add the setting at the start of one of these files (after any initial comments)
The standard way for global environment variables would be to add an entry in /etc/environment (you do not use the command export in this file as it is not a normal bash script)
CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat
Not recommended
You can set the environment variables in the bash (command line shell) configuration files, but these are not recommended as they are not always picked up (eg. if you are running a server that you dont login to to run tomcat): ~/.bashrc | ~/.profile | /etc.bash.bashrc | /etc/profile
Solution 4:
Open your Bash runcom file:
nano ~/.bashrc
This will most likely contain quite a bit of data already. Most of the definitions here are for setting bash options, which are unrelated to environmental variables. You can set environmental variables just like you would from the command line:
export VARNAME=value
See How To Read and Set Environmental and Shell Variables on Linux
I tested it on Ubuntu 16.04. Works great.