How do I add a program with a directory of dependencies to $PATH?

Question

I want to add a program to my $PATH, but its code is split into various files that it imports at run-time from a lib/ in its root directory.

projectRootDirectory
├ programBinary
└ lib
  ├ someLibrary
  └ someLibrary2

How do I add such a program to my $PATH without it complaining about missing dependencies?

---

I'd normally get the binary into /usr/local/bin by

• copying

  cp /path/to/programBinary /usr/local/bin
  

• or symlinking

  cd /usr/local/bin
  ln -s /path/to/programBinary programBinary
  

but both make it fail to find its dependencies.

I can't move the whole directory into /usr/local/bin because some of the required files are executables too, which I don't want cluttering my $PATH.

How should I be doing this?

Answer 1

You can of course add projectRootDirectory to your $PATH, but this has at least two drawbacks:

• It looks like, the way you are describing it, this particular project does not organize its project nicely into bin and lib subdirectories like so:

  projectRootDirectory
  ├ bin
  │ └ programBinary
  └ lib
    ├ someLibrary
    └ someLibrary2
  

  therefore you'd be forced to put projectRootDirectory itself into the $PATH, and since that contains other things besides binaries intended for execution, it's a bit ugly.

• If you have many similar projects, the contents of your $PATH will proliferate out of control.

Instead, the simplest thing you can probably do in this particular case is to place a wrapper executable in /usr/local/bin, which is a very simple shell script that just runs the "real" program from the location where it lives.

#!/bin/sh
exec projectRootDirectory/programBinary "$@"

Since the wrapper script is calling it with its full pathname, it will probably be able to locate its auxiliary files in the manner it normally does.

Answer 2

There are many ways of different complexity to approach that issue, and what fits best depends on your "packaging philosophy".

The approach I'd probably choose is to have a wrapper script in your /usr/local/bin directory that does nothing but setting the exported PATH variable, modified by your library path, and call the main program in your library path; in this case all executables would reside in your lib directory, only the initial wrapper script in /usr/local/bin. (The locally defined PATH variable will only be inherited by the called processes and not taint the calling environment.)