find composer global install path as root

Question

I have some php packages installed globally using php composer within a script

sudo -u me composer global require "phpmd/phpmd"

I want to find the path of these globally installed php packages. When I run which phpmd as user me I get the full path.

/home/me/.composer/vendor/bin/phpcs

However when I try and run the command as sudo I get nothing. I think this is because composer has been added globally and is in my user mes PATH while it is not present in sudo's PATH.

Instead I have tried

 path="$(sudo -u me which phpcs)"

But this also fails. However it succeeds for any program not installed through composer. How can I find the globally installed php packages through composer as sudo?

me's path

/home/me/.composer/vendor/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

sudo (su's) path

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

Solution 1

The problem, as you can notice in the path difference, is that me's path includes /home/me/.composer/vendor/bin. Sudo does not inherit the user's environment.

You would need to manually import it. It's unclear why you'd want root to see a specific user's files in its path though.

To find a file, you can use the find command such as find /home -name FileName.

Solution 2

Thanks to Julie's suggestion and some other answers on SO I came up with

 path="$(PATH=$PATH:/home/me/.composer/vendor/bin which phpcs)"

which works nicely

Comments

[Julie Pelletier]

To troubleshoot, please show me's and root's path. That's probably where the problem is.

[myol]

updated the question @JuliePelletier

[myol]

Manually import the composer path?