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How does one go about getting a new environment variable picked up system-wide without restarting the server?

As its an Ubuntu 11.x server, I'm using Upstart to start/restart processes.

I added a new environment variable to /etc/environment that needs to be picked up by one of my app's processes.

If I start the process directly from my shell, the variable is being picked up and all is fine (I've already sourced /etc/environment for my session). However, when I start/restart the process using its Upstart service name, the variable is not being seen.

 sudo start app-name

I'm pretty sure that if I restarted the server the new variable will get picked up, however I would like to try to avoid that. I have some other live processes running on it that I'd like to avoid interrupting if at all possible.

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Put the env stanza in your upstart job description file.

http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Stanzas#env

env PIDFILE=/var/run/myprocess.pid

Or whatever. It's all in the documentation.

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Thanks, I can totally make that work. I'd like to go further and make it global and permanent though. I'm setting a variable that multiple processes can use to determine if they're in a development or production environment. The conf file will work for now because I develop on a Mac, but I eventually will have an integration environment running Ubuntu and each server will run multiple separate app processes. It would be convenient for them all not to rely on the confs. – Geuis Dec 17 '11 at 11:09
What? You wanna use Upstart. Good. You need to specify things in the Upstart's configuration so that it knows how to start the processes. It's either that, or you make a wrapper script that sets and exports environment variables (messy) Or modify the default bash profile, so they're always set and exported (Insanely Messy). – Tom O'Connor Dec 17 '11 at 11:12
The right way to do this is to use something like Puppet to manage your different environments, and then Puppet can manage the different configuration files, across many servers, without fuss. – Tom O'Connor Dec 17 '11 at 11:13
Tom, I'm running into an odd problem. Using env, I can't set any custom environment variables. If I set system defined vars, they are being read by the app. But my own aren't. For example, I set without quotes in the conf, "env DISPLAY=foo" and DISPLAY is picked up with a value of foo. But if I set "env TESTENV=foo" the variable TESTENV isn't even detected. – Geuis Dec 17 '11 at 11:53
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I'll give rc.local a try after a bit of sleep. Thanks for the setgid tips. I've also been hesitant about sudo but that's what most of the examples I've seen do and it works. For my existing apps, its been working pretty reliably for a while now but I'm going to look into your link and see how it could be done more securely. Really appreciate your help tonight and hopefully I can figure out the rest. – Geuis Dec 17 '11 at 13:50
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