Question

I made a program in Java that uses two external databases. The paths to these databases are hard-coded inside my program code.

In order to make this program usable for other users on other computers (who should also install these two databases on their computers), I think that the path for these two databases should be added as environmental variables ? How could this be done ?

I am not a professional when it comes to environmental variables, so can you please advise what should be done in this case?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

To get the value of an environment variable in Java, you write something like this:

String pathToDatabase = System.getenv().get("PATH_TO_DATABASE");

(where PATH_TO_DATABASE is the name of the environment variable). This uses System.getenv() to get a map of all environment variables.

To set the value of an environment variable in Linux, your users can write something like this:

export PATH_TO_DATABASE=/this/is/the/path/to/the/database

before running the program.