Anyway to update the default PATH?

[andymckay]

Locally I've got 4 (there's probably more) ways of running xbar:

• at login
• using Finder
• using an app launcher like Alfred
• from the terminal

You might get a different path from doing those. I wrote a quick plugin like this to discover all the paths that you get.

#!/bin/bash
echo Environment variables
echo ---
for e in `env`; do
  echo "$e"
done

And I can see that in some cases I'll get /usr/bin/local in there, depending upon how its run, sometimes I won't.

This is a similar issue to:

• https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/774
• https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/730
• https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/721

Where people are finding that the PATH is different.

Would it make sense to try injecting /usr/bin/local into the environment? Or is there another way to avoid this problem? Currently I'm asking all the users of xbar to run it from the terminal.

[matryer]

Thanks @andymckay - this is a great issue.

@leaanthony This seems like something we can address, what do you think it best practice here?

[leaanthony]

Have paths in config and add them to the env on startup.

[andymckay]

In the end I found it pretty easy to drop in a bash file, that adds in /usr/local/bin to the $PATH and then that calls the JS file. That's worked so far for every way I've been able to launch xbar and for all the users of my plugins.

[alexrussell]

I've just posted a technique at https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/856#issuecomment-1445501343 that may also be useful to mitigate this issue from the plugin side without needing a plugin file to first run some shell commands and then call your actual executable.