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EnvPane - A macOS preference pane for environment variables

<img src="EnvPane.png" style="float:left"/>

News

Release 0.8 is built for macOS 12 "Monterey" and up. It uses code-signed, universal binaries that run on Intel and Apple Silicon processors. It is not notarized by Apple and therefore requires special treatment during installation in order to work around quarantine.

What is it?

EnvPane is a preference pane for macOS that lets you set environment variables for all applications, both GUI and terminal. Not only does it restore support for ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist (seeBackground), it also publishes your changes to the environment immediately, without the need to log out and back in. This works for changes made by manually editing ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist as well via the preference pane UI.

EnvPane 0.8 was tested under macOS 12 "Monterey" on Apple Silicon and Intel.

EnvPane 0.6 was tested under OS X 10.09 "Mavericks", OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" and macOS Sierra (10.12). It should also work on 10.10 "Yosemite". Apple reimplemented launchd in 10.10 and in the course of doing so deprecated the APIs used by EnvPane and even broke some of them. EnvPane v0.6 adds support for the new but undocumented APIs, addressing the deprecation and broken APIs.

Caveats

EnvPane does not work for setting the PATH environment variable. See the FAQ on that topic.

EnvPane cannot be used to set DYLD_… variables. This is restriction imposed by macOS, I assume for security reasons.

While EnvPane is code-signed, it is not yet notarized by Apple. Lack of notarization means that it will be quarantined when downloaded by a web browser. macOS refuses to run quarantined binaries, displaying a mildly misleading error message. A user reports that, on Ventura, right-clicking the preference pane in Finder and selecting Open overrides that restriction. I was not able to confirm that workaround for Monterey (I haven't upgraded to Ventura yet). For details, refer to #34.

Download

The code-signed binary of EnvPane can bedownloaded from GitHub. Be sure to read the [installation instructions].

Alternatively you might want to grab the source and build it yourself.

Background

Mac OS X releases prior to Mountain Lion (10.8) included support for ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, a file that contained session-global, per-user environment variables. Starting with Mountain Lion, support of this well-documented and popular mechanism was dropped without an official announcement or explanation by Apple. It may have been in [response] flashback to the Flashback trojan which used that file to inject itself into every process, but this is a wild guess, especially considering that there is a relatively easy workaround, as demonstrated by the existence of this very utility.

EnvPane includes (and automatically installs) a launchd agent that runs 1) early after login and 2) whenever the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist changes. The agent reads ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist and exports the environment variables from that file to the current user's launchd instance via the same API that is used by launchctl setenv and launchctl unsetenv.

TODO: Mention /etc/launchd.conf and ~/.launchd.conf

Requirements

macOS 12 "Monterey" or higher.

For release 0.6, Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" or higher.'

Installation

One liner

Run this command in Terminal to download and install EnvPane in a single step.

(cd ~/Library/PreferencePanes && rm -rf EnvPane.prefPane && curl -sL https://github.com/hschmidt/EnvPane/releases/download/releases%2F0.8/EnvPane-0.8.tar.bz2 | tar -xjf -)

Traditional installation

  1. Download EnvPane-0.8.dmg
  2. Run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/EnvPane-0.8.dmg in Terminal
  3. Double-click the downloadedEnvPane-0.8.dmg. A Finder window opens
  4. Double-click the EnvPane.pref-pane file
  5. Choose Install for this user only

Do not use the Install for all users option. See the FAQ.

Usage

When you open the Environment Variables preference pane, you will see a simple two-column table that lists the environment variables from your ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. If that file doesn't exist, the table will be empty but the file will be created as soon as you add an entry to the table. To add an environment variable click the + button. Specify the name of the new variable, hit tab and specify its value. Hit enter. To modify a variable, click its name or value, make the desired changes and hit enter. To delete an environment variable, click a row in the table and click the - button.

Changes are effective immediately (after a delay of a few seconds) in all subsequently launched applications. There is no need to reboot or log out. However, running applications will [not be affected] (#why-arent-running-applications-affected). You need to quit and relaunch the application, in order for your changes to take effect.

The $ character in a value has special meaning. It induces the interpolation of other environment variables or the output of shell commands. If the $ character is followed by the name of another variable, e.g. $FOO the value of that variable will be inserted in place. The referenced variable can be one explicitly defined in the preference pane or it can be one from the default environment that launchd sets up. The variable name following $ must contain only letters, digits or underscore and may not start with a digit. To interpolate a variable whose name does not meet those requirements, place the variable name between curly braces, e.g. ${F-O-O}. You can also interpolate the name of an interpolated variable: assuming the variable EFF is set to the value F, ${${EFF}OO} would reference the variabe FOO. Don't worry if this looks confusing, this is an esoteric feature.

To interpolate the output of a shell command, enclose it in parentheses. $(date), for example, is replaced with the current date, because that's what the date program prints to standard output. The command is subject to shell expansion –because it is invoked via /bin/sh -c– but also to immediate variable interpolation by EnvPane as described above. In other words, $(BAR=bar ; echo $BAR) will not evaluate to bar because the $BAR reference will be interpolated by EnvPane, at a time when BAR is not yet defined. To prevent EnvPane from evaluating the reference, you must escape the dollar sign: $(BAR=bar; echo $$BAR).

Again, whenever you need a literal dollar sign in a variable value, you need do write two dollar signs: $$. If you need a closing parentheses inside a command interpolation, or a closing curly brace inside a variable interpolation, you need to write $() or ${} respectively. I now realize that $) and $} would have been a better choice but it is what it is.

Uninstallation

  1. Open System Preferences

  2. Right click Environment Variables

  3. Select Remove Environment Variables Preference Pane

The uninstallation should be clean. I went to great lengths in ensuring that removing the preference pane doesn't leave orphaned files on the system. The ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist will not be removed.

Changelog

v0.8

v0.7

v0.6

v0.5 and v0.4

Ignore. They are releases made from a fork of this repository, not by the original author and inauspiciously using the EnvPane name.

v0.3

Fix: Preference pane fails to load if ~/Library/LaunchAgents is missing (issue #2)

v0.2

Fix: Preference pane fails to load if ~/.MacOSX or ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist are missing (issue #1).

v0.1.1

Improved documentation.

v0.1

Initial release.

<a id="building-from-source"></a> Building from source

Build Requirements

Building

  1. Clone the EnvPane repository on Github

  2. Open the Xcode project

  3. At the project level, adjust the launchd_source_dir custom build setting to point to the copy of the launchd source tree

  4. Build the project

Linker complaints about libmarkdown. e.g.

ld: warning: object file (/usr/local/lib/libmarkdown.a(markdown.o)) was built for newer OSX version (10.11) than being linked (10.9)

are to be expected when linking against a HomeBrew-ed installation of that library on 10.10 or newer.

The -load_all linker flag is needed to prevent errors like

exception:-[__NSCFDictionary writeToFile:atomically:createParent:createAncestors:error:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

FAQ

<a id="why-cant-i-install-the-preference-pane-for-all-users"></a>

Why can't I install the preference pane for all users?

There are two reasons. The first one is a technicality: the environment variables configured via the preference pane are actually set by a launchd agent contained in the bundle. The agent uses launchd's WatchPath mechanism in order to be notified when the user's ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist changes. Unfortunately, there is no way to specify a WatchPath that is relative to the user's home directory. By installing the EnvPane preference pane for individual users, each instance can use a separate copy of the agent configuration in ~/Library/LaunchAgents as opposed to globally in /Library/LaunchAgents. The second reason is that cleanly uninstalling the agent would be more complex for a preference pane that was installed globally for all users. Apple is eagerly deprecating privilege escalation mechanism left and right, leaving the half-baked SMJobBless and the rudimentary authopen. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, I'm just not convinced it'd be worth the effort.

<a id="why-arent-running-applications-affected"></a>

Why aren't running applications affected?

Say, you have a shell session running in the Terminal application. You might wonder why changes to the environment made with EnvPane don't show up in the shell's environment. The answer to this question lies in Unix' process model. When a process is forked, it inherits a copy of the environment from its parent process. The copy is independent, so changes in the parent aren't visible in the child and vice versa. Doing anything else would undoubtedly fling open Pandora's box of concurrency.

Applications launched via Finder are in fact forked by the per-user instance of launchd, and thus inherit their environment from it. EnvPane uses launchd's API to modify the environment of the user's launchd instance which will then pass a copy of its modified environment to subsequently launched applications. The environment of running applications has already been copied and will not be affected.

For applications other than Terminal the only workaround is to restart the application. In Terminal on OS X 10.09 and older, you can update the shell's environment by running

eval `launchctl export`

This will update the shell's environment, not Terminal's. Terminal's environment is still unchanged and will be passed on to each new shell window or tab. This means you will have to run the above command in each subsequently opened Terminal tab or window. Ultimately it might be better to just restart Terminal. Unfortunately, 10.10 removed the export functionality.

<a id="why-cant-I-set-path-with-envpane"></a>

Why can't I set PATH with EnvPane?

That's because OS X treats PATH differently to other environment variables, I suspect for security reasons. The special treatment differs from version to version of OS X but in a nutshell there are two issues: Firstly, launchd will forcefully set PATH to a fixed value, overriding a value set using the standard launchd APIs used by EnvPane. Secondly, a login shell launched in Terminal will mangle the value by placing entries from /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d at the beginning of the PATH variable. There are workarounds for both issues but EnvPane doesn't currently implement those, mainly because they involve root privileges, something I've shyed away from so far. You will have to perform them manually. The launchd override for PATH can be configured using launchctl config user path or launchctl config system path. See the man launchctl for details. I think the user form of that command is broken on El Capitan, so you'll have to resort to system there. Amusingly, there is no documented way revert to the defaults. You'll have to delete /private/var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/config/system.plist and/or /private/var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/config/user.plist and reboot. The /etc/paths issue can be worked around by duplicating the additional entries from launchctl config … path in /etc/paths. See man path_helper for details.

My personal opinion is that the hardcoding of PATH by launchd is misguided. PATH was meant to be a mere convenience for interactive shell use. If a security-sensitive system component needs to ensure that a particular binary is executed, it should specify that binary using an absolute PATH.

Another rant: the fact that launchtl config user path has system-wide scope and therefore needs sudo privileges is also amusing. If it's called "user" then it should be user-specific, not global.

License

Copyright 2012, 2016, 2017 Hannes Schmidt

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); 
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. 
You may obtain a copy of the License at 

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software 
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, 
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.  
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Copyright Notices

Green Leaf icon by Bruno Maia

Copyright 2008 IconTexto
http://www.icontexto.com
Released under CC License Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Launchd by Apple Computer, Inc.

Copyright (c) 2005 Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.

Discount by David Loren Parsons

This product includes software developed by
David Loren Parsons <http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc>

Acknowledgements

Kudos to Jonathan Levin for his reversing of the new launchd and launchctl. I used the trial version of the Hopper Disassembler/debugger for OS X to figure out the rest.