What is the best place to setup system wide environment variables on Linux?

Question

I just want to setup a system wide environment variable, JAVA_HOME for all users, including root user.

Requirements:

• accessible to normal users
• accessible to root
• always loaded, not only for bash (gnome-terminal does not start a bash by default)
• to work on Ubuntu, Debian and optionally Red Hat
• great if addition could be easily scripted

Answer 1

I don't understand why you ruled out /etc/profile. That is the correct location.

Answer 2

On Debian/Ubuntu that would be /etc/environment

I don't know the Red Hat equivalent.

Answer 3

One a side note: Have a look at the Modules Environment. I use this every time I have to offer a complex, versioned, self-extensible, concise UNIX environment to dozens or hundreds of users. It's mainly used on large scale multi-user HPC environments. Just using it for one particular variable is certainly over-engineering it, but it does an awesome job once you need more than a few software packages and their environment.

Answer 4

As nobody added a full answer here is what I currently consider the best, at least for ubuntu but I am open to adapt the answer for other *nix platforms.

# **create**: /etc/profile.d/java.sh
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java

Other options that were already considered but ruled out:

• /etc/environment works but is harder to maintain as other tools or people can edit it.
• /etc/profile - same as above

Answer 5

/etc/profile should work. I tested just now to be sure, put export SOMETEST=1234 to /etc/profile and after re-logging echo $SOMETEST gave me 1234 as expected. Also from gnome-terminal

Answer 6

You cannot use any ~ specific files in this case. so....

/etc/profile would be the proper place for it in this case. Current logged in users have to get a new login session though, but this should not be that big of a problem.

@wk01: /etc/profile is not loaded by a nonlogin shell by default. your .bashrc is probably loading it...