Create linux environment variable using vagrant provisioner

Question

I've got vagrant running Ubuntu for development purposes. I've used a shell script provisioner to download/install my dependencies and create some aliases, but I've hit a wall in terms of using the provisioner to create environment variables (which are used for several flags within my project). Originally I had something like:

export MY_VAR='value' 

Into my provisioner script, but then found out that you can't add environment variables from inside a shell script by running it normally. Fair enough, so I tried instead changing my line of the Vagrantfile to:

config.vm.provision "shell", inline: “source setup.sh" 

Which didn't solve the problem. Environment variables still weren't there. I tried adding the exports directly as an inline:

config.vm.provision "shell", inline: “export MY_VAR='value'" 

No luck. Still no global environment when I ssh'ed in. Is there a way to use the shell script to set a bash environment variable, or is it time to throw in the towel on shell provisioners and learn chef?

Answer 1

You should have the provisioning script add a line to your .profile:

echo "export VAR=value" >> ~/.profile 

On login, the .profile script will be read by bash and the variable will be set.

Answer 2

Seeing as the accepted answer does indeed add an export VAR=value to your .profile (or .bashrc) file each time you run vagrant provision, here's how I've added environment variables quickly

source ~/.profile && [ -z "$VAR" ] && echo "export VAR=value" >> ~/.profile 

Breakdown:

• source ~/.profile: load the current .profile file
• [ -z "$VAR"]: check whether or not VAR is set, if not:
• echo "export VAR=value" >> ~/.profile: add the export line to .profile

Putting it all together:

I normally use puphpet for my vagrant boxes, so I tend to stick to the directory structure it uses, which means putting my provisioning script in puphpet/shell/* (relative to the Vagrantfile file). In that file, you can add as many environment variables as you like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash #Replace .profile with .bashrc if required source ~/.profile if [ -z "$VAR" ]; then # only checks if VAR is set, regardless of its value     echo "export VAR=value" >> ~/.profile fi #other env variables and profile stuff here 

If you want to set the environment variables to a specific value, even if they're set, you can replace [ -z "$VAR" ] with this (As Maks3w suggested):

if [ -z "$VAR" ] || [ "$VAR" != "value" ]; then     #same as before fi 

Then simply add this to your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.provision "shell", path: "puphpet/shell/your-script.sh" 

That ought to do the trick...