How to set environment variables that last
Solution 1
Short: It is not possible. You can't change the environment of your parent process. You can only change your own and pass it to your children.
What you should do is maintain a config file. There are plenty of go config libs out there: ini, yaml, etc.
If your program changes the config, save it to disk after each change or one in a while or when the process exits.
Solution 2
Whilst not considered possible, if you're building some cli tool that exits you could consider outputting the equivalent shell to STDOUT like: docker-machine eval.
Quick and dirty example:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"reflect"
"strings"
)
type config struct {
db_host string
db_port int
db_user string
}
func main() {
c := config{"db.example.com", 3306, "user1"}
ct := reflect.ValueOf(&c).Elem()
typeOfC := ct.Type()
for i := 0; i < ct.NumField(); i++ {
f := ct.Field(i)
fmt.Printf("%s=%v\n", strings.ToUpper(typeOfC.Field(i).Name), f)
}
}
Output:
$ go run env.go
DB_HOST=db.example.com
DB_PORT=3306
DB_USER=user1
You can then eval
it on the command line and have access to those variables.
$ eval $(go run env.go)
$ echo $DB_HOST
db.example.com
Solution 3
The only way to get the behavior you want is to alter the environment of the current shell, and the easiest way is with a simple shell script
# setup.sh
export DBHOST="dbhost.url"
export CONFIG_VAR_TWO="testing"
and then
$ source setup.sh
hey
Updated on June 11, 2022Comments
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hey almost 2 years
I'm trying to set some environment variables on my machine using Go OS
err := os.Setenv("DBHOST", dbHostLocal) if err != nil { log.Fatalf("err %v", err) }
It seems the variable is available to the Go program but once I quite / terminate the Go process the variable is no longer available. I'm wondering if it's possible to set these variables permanently. The reason is that i was looking to create a "setup" file with config files ( db name etc ) for the local and dev environment so that I could switch between without any setup at all... just one time go run setup.go.
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Elie G. almost 5 yearsThis is just for windows though