Question

So I’m trying to do something that involves running sbt over an SSH command, and this is what I’m trying:

ssh my_username@<server ip> "cd <project folder>; sbt 'run-main Foo' "

When I do that however, I get an error message: bash: sbt: command not found

Then I go SSH into the server myself, cd to the project folder, and run sbt 'run-main Foo' and everything works nicely. I have checked to make sure sbt is on the $PATH variable on the remote server via ssh my_username@<server ip> "echo $PATH" and it shows the correct value.

I feel like this is a simple fix, but cannot figure it out… help?
Thanks!
-kstruct

Answer 1

When you log in, bash is run as an interactive shell. When you run commands directly through ssh, bash is run as a non-interactive shell, and therefore different initialization files are sourced (see the bash manual pages for which exactly). There are a number of ways to fix this, e.g.:

• Use the full path to sbt when calling it directly through ssh
• Edit .bashrc and add the missing directories to the PATH environment variable

Note that your test ssh my_username@<server ip> "echo $PATH" actually prints PATH on your client, not your server, because of the double quotes. Use ssh my_username@<server ip> 'echo $PATH' or ssh my_username@<server ip> env to print PATH from the server’s environment. When checking using env, you will see that PS1 is only set in interactive shells.