How to permanently change sudo's $PATH variable (Ubuntu 9.x)

Question

I want add some directory to the $PATH when running sudo, this is a (semi) permanent requirement, not something that needs to be added to the scripts themselves. I notice that Django has managed to do it, (my $PATH when running sudo is "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/django/django-trunk/django/bin") - so how did it do that?

Answer 1

This is the line in the sudoers file that resets:

Defaults env_reset

You can work around this by adding PATH to env_keeps or by adding this line:

Defaults env_keep = "PATH"

EDIT: meder, you do not disable env_reset, you simply bypass the path reset

Or you can remove the offending env_reset line.

Even better though, you can declare a secure_path that will replace PATH when sudo is run:

Defaults secure_path="/bin:/usr/bin"

That way you can control what specific directories to include in the path.

Answer 2

I think this should work out if you save it in /root/.bashrc:

export PATH=/www/foo:$PATH

I forget if it's PATH or PYTHONPATH and if it actually matters, this is based on my user's .bashrc:

export PYTHONPATH=/www/django:$PYTHONPATH