Pass environment variable through to another user when being run as sudo

Question

I am installing Tomcat on a RHEL5 machine, and am having some trouble starting it, because JAVA_HOME isn't set. Tomcat is being started using

sudo /sbin/service tomcat start

and runs under the user tomcat. When I am logged in as myself or as the root user, JAVA_HOME is properly set (using /etc/profile.d/java.sh). I am guessing that this isn't being properly passed through by sudo.

Can someone point me in the direction of the change I need to make to get this variable either passed through by sudo or picked up by the tomcat user? I believe there are a number of ways.

Thanks in advance

Rich

Answer 1

One way to do it is to add JAVA_HOME to the tomcat start up script, which should be in /etc/init.d

Answer 2

mazianni's answer is correct.

More info:

For a non-interactive shell /etc/profile is not read and therefore /etc/profile.d/*.sh aren't read either.

JAVA_HOME is set in your interactive shell. sudo strips out most environment variables. You could configure the env_keep in /etc/sudoers to allow JAVA_HOME through but if you ever set tomcat to automatically start this method will no longer work. (Hence mazianni's solution is the best.)

Answer 3

Try sudo -E <your command>. This preserves (most of) the environment. See man sudo for more information.

Answer 4

You can temporarily set a variable before execution in BASH. This will be available to the command immediately following.

JAVA_HOME=/path/to/java sudo /sbin/service tomcat start

Answer 5

Read man sudoers.

Using visudo (never edit /etc/sudoers directly!), you can choose to set !env_reset to globally allow (most) environment variables to pass through sudo, or add to env_keep which specific variables should be kept.