I use Qt Creator with custom build system (ninja).
The issue is that the $PATH variable passed to the Qt Creator IDE is absolutely vanilla: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin.
So I have to write bash -c '/path/to/ninja list of targets' instead of just ninja list of targets, or perform build steps in a terminal, not in the IDE.
I tried all known recipes to set up the $PATH.
- ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile
- /etc/paths
- /etc/paths.d/*
- /etc/launchd.conf (
setenv PATH .....) - ~/Library/LaunchAgents/*.plist (
sh -c 'launchtcl setenv PATH $PATH:.....') - /Library/LaunchAgents/*.plist
The idea of using launch agenes is described in a StackOverflow answer.
None works!
Any arbitrary environment var in my custom .plist file sets correctly, - any but the PATH.
(I have tested it simply: created a custom build step echo xzxzxz=$XZXZXZ path=$PATH where xzxzxz is also set in my launch agent).
It's interesting that if I launch Qt Creator from bash session ('/Applications/Qt Creator.app/Contents/MacOS/Qt Creator' &), it gets correct PATH, same as the bash itself.
Also it's interesting that the PATH assigned with the launch agent is later overwritten. There I wrote sh -c 'launchctl setenv PATH $PATH:/HELLOWORLD', but I don't see that HELLOWORLD in echo $PATH.
So, there are a race condition, someone rebuilds the PATH from /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d later.
Thus:
- is there an exhaustive and up-to-date explanation how to set up environment variables, and particularly PATH, on OSX 10.10 ?
- why the PATH becomes vanilla?
- how to win with Qt Creator?
You could just update the path to the build environment of your project inside Qt Creator.
Newer versions (>3.3 AFAIR, 3.4 for certain) allow to set environment overrides in each the kit, so that you could have it for all projects using those.