Running ant through eclipse it doesn't find environment variables, but running ant through terminal is fine

Question

When i run ant through Eclipse some targets build fine, but ones that need a specific environment variable i.e. SOME_SDK that i set in my .profile file won't work. Even if i try to echo out ${env.JAVA_HOME}, Ant through eclipse will just print out that string. But if i run ant through the terminal (i.e. ant sometarget), it will find JAVA_HOME and SOME_SDK and echo those paths out. Ive checked eclipse that it's pointing to the same ant that is in my environment path (/usr/share/java/ant-1.8.1). Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

When you open a terminal, the environment variables in your .profile get loaded. When you start Eclipse via the windowing system it is not being run under your user account, so your .profile is not available to Eclipse at runtime.

At least that's the case on my linux machine and I'm guessing its the same on a Mac. I put the environment variables that Eclipse needs to see in the /etc/profile file, which gets loaded at system startup.