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megas
Asked: 2013-12-18 13:52:24 +0800 CST

HOME variable is not set

  • 772

I have two servers, they're identical (I believe), production and staging servers.

And I have upstart script in /etc/init/ folder.

description "Discoure process"

setuid deploy
setgid deploy

respawn
respawn limit 3 30

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [06]

script
exec /bin/bash <<'EOT'
  echo \"$HOME/.rbenv\"

  cd /home/deploy/discourse/current

  bundle exec bluepill load config/discourse.pill --no-privileged --base-dir tmp/bluepill --logfile log/bluepill.log
EOT
end script

On the staging server it works well, but when I'm running that script on production server then the HOME variable is empty, the code echo "$HOME/.rbenv" is evaluating to "/.rbenv"

What might be a problem here? Thanks

upstart

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Read this question on stackoverflow.com and this answer by user grawity on superuser.com

    You should not use $HOME in init.d, because it is not clear which users home to use, until this user logs in.

    Quote from POSIX specification:

    HOME
The system shall initialize this variable at the time of login to be a pathname
of the user's home directory. See <pwd.h>.

    You can use little hack, to get home folder of user myuser in your script

    su - myuser -c /usr/bin/env | grep HOME

    It is better to use script below, because usually there can be other HOME_* folders. Such as JAVA_HOME etc.

    su - myuser -c /usr/bin/env | grep "^HOME="
    • 11

  2. Seems like the $HOME is being interpreted before it goes to bash? I would try one of the following. Either add:

    env HOME=/home/MyName

    to the code just after the description.

    Or move the code from inside the script block to another script file with:

    #! /bin/bash

    as line 1. Then have

    exec /path/to/my/script.sh
    • 8

  3. If all you need is the HOME variable to be set (which solved my problem), you can explicitly set it with the env directive:

    env HOME=/home/user

    via https://askubuntu.com/a/1125244/160358

    • 1