$PATH is very hard to set on MacOS Yosemite about watchman

[wez]

this a regression from switching to launchd (watchman is supposed to capture your PATH at the time you launch it).

A workaround would be to edit ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist and add something like:

<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
<dict>
    <key>PATH</key>
    <string>INSERT YOUR PATH HERE</string>
</dict>

(see man launchd.plist for more on this file)

then:

launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist

I'll work up a fix sometime in the coming week.

[dmcg]

That's a little less palatable than my solution TBH, because it doesn't update as I update .profile, and as I've just updated to Yosemite and am having to reinstall my toolchain $PATH is a bit of a moving target ;-)

Thanks for the attention, I'll look forward to a pukka fix.

[jschaf]

I just ran into this issue. All of the homebrew tools are unavailable by default. @wez's solution works. I did the following for PATH

<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
<dict>
  <key>PATH</key>
  <string>$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin</string>
</dict>

[jimtla]

Any updates on this? As a hack I've added a script to freeze my current env into the plist:

#Freeze the current env to the watchman config. This is a hack to get around
# https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/68
ENVIRONMENT=$(env | sed 's/=/<\/key><string>/' | sed -e 's/^/<key>/' | sed -e 's/$/<\/string>/')
echo $ENVIRONMENT

PLIST=~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist

# Remove the last two lines.
sed -i '' -e '$ d' $PLIST
sed -i '' -e '$ d' $PLIST

# replace the second to last line (previously "</dict>") with our environment +
# "</dict>"
echo "<key>EnvironmentVariables</key><dict>"$ENVIRONMENT"</dict></dict>" >> $PLIST

# Replace the last line
echo "</plist>" >> $PLIST

# Reload the watchman config
launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist

but it's annoying to manually run that after any update to my env.

[wez]

We have a diff that we'll land real soon now: https://reviews.facebook.net/D36045

[wez]

This has landed; we're going to cut 3.1 with this fix in it soon and submit a PR to homebrew.
Meanwhile, you can do brew install --HEAD watchman to pick up this fix.

[sunny-mittal]

I am still having an issue related to this (I think) using 3.3.0. I ran the following in my project root:

$ watchman watch `pwd`
$ watchman -- trigger `pwd` js '*.js' -- "browserify -o bundle.js"

But when I check the logs, I see a "No such file or directory" error. If I change the command to cat or something, I see the output in the log as expected. The plist confirms that my path is getting picked up, but it doesn't seem to be able to find browserify.

[wez]

I think you want this:

watchman -- triggerpwdjs '*.js' -- browserify -o bundle.js

otherwise watchman will try to find the file named "browserify -o bundle.js" in your path and execute it

[sunny-mittal]

I tried that as well...no luck. I also tried it with various node-related commands and they all fail with the same error. Any other ideas? In the log file, I can see that the path is correct but it just doesn't seem to want to execute any command related to node.

[wez]

I can't see your log file so I don't have any more context than you have shared on this closed issue.
I'd recommend just making a wrapper script that sets the appropriate things in the environment:

#!/bin/sh
PATH="$PATH:/some/where"
NODE_PATH="whatever is appropriate"
export PATH NODE_PATH
exec browserify -o bundle.js "$@"

[sunny-mittal]

I'll give that a shot. Thanks for your help!

[jimtla]

For anybody looking - my hack to freeze the environment into the plist doesn't work so well anymore, but I wrote a new script to bake the current environment into a shell script:

#!/bin/bash -e -x

# Takes a bash script as the only argument, and prints the location of a new
# shell script that executes the given script with the current environment.

SCRIPT=`mktemp $TMPDIR"bake_env".XXXXXXXX`
ENVIRONMENT=$(env | sed "s/=\(.*\)\$/='\1'/g" | sed 's/^/;export /')
echo "#!/bin/bash -e" >> $SCRIPT
echo "true"$ENVIRONMENT >> $SCRIPT
ABS_PATH=`python -c "import os; print os.path.realpath('$1')"`
echo "exec $ABS_PATH \$@" >> $SCRIPT
chmod a+x $SCRIPT
echo $SCRIPT

When I want to run something with watchman I pass the target to run to that script, and then pass the output to watchman.