Fabric environment variables set in .bashrc are not available

Question

I'm using Fab to deploy my application. The running of my application depends on some environment variables set in $HOME/.bashrc. However when I use fab to run the application using the below command

run("java -jar app.jar")

This application does not run as expected because the environment variables like SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT I set in $HOME/.bashrc are not available for this application?

I have set the env variables in $HOME/.bashrc as below

export SMTP_PORT=abc

How do I ensure the environment variables are set before I execute the run() command to run the app?

Answer 1

You can find the following lines in .bashrc:

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
    *i*) ;;
      *) return;;
esac

that means fabric will never source code after that block, as fabric runs your command non-interactively (in form of /bin/bash -l -c some_command)

so the simple workaround is moving export SMTP_PORT=abc to .bash_profile or .profile