Question

I try to start some command from ssh non-interactive ssh connection. I use ant-sshexec connection for that.

In order to set everything up I used this article:
http://www.raphink.info/2008/09/forcing-environment-in-ssh.html

I use ~/.ssh/environment.
In order to do that, I set PermitUserEnvironment to “yes” in sshd_config and restarted sshd.

In my .ssh/environment I have this content:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/home/ubuntu/java/jdk1.6.0_27/bin

JAVA_HOME=/home/ubuntu/java/jdk1.6.0_27

#PATH=/home/ubuntu/java/jdk1.6.0_27/bin:$PATH

#PLAY_HOME=/home/ubuntu/play

and I have the error when try to connect using non-interactive connection:

 [sshexec] Could not execute the java executable, please make sure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set properly (the java executable should reside at JAVA_HOME/bin/java). 

But I added the java to the path..

Answer 1

The man page for sshd(8) says this about ~/.ssh/environment:

    It can only contain empty lines, comment lines (that start with
    ‘#’), and assignment lines of the form name=value.

That is, it is not a shell script at all. You have double quotes, variable expansion and an alias definition. None of that will work. Try this:

PATH=/home/ubuntu/java/jdk1.6.0_27/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
JAVA_HOME=/home/ubuntu/java/jdk1.6.0_27
PLAY_HOME=/home/ubuntu/play

Also ensure that the permissions on the ~/.ssh/environment are as described in the man page — no group or other write permissions on the file.

If you are concerned with locking yourself out of the account with a broken environment, test by logging onto the host first and running test commands such like this:

ssh localhost 'echo $JAVA_HOME'

You can ensure that the environment variables are set as you expect them and if something goes wrong, you are still logged onto the host allowing you to reverse your changes.