I have an environment variable setup in user user_a's .profile:
export NODE_ENV=dev
When I log in as the user and launch a bash shell, if the environment variable is correctly set. If I do echo $NODE_ENV I get dev printed out as expected.
If I log in as a different user user_b and then become user_a via the command sudo su user_a, the environment variable is not set.
How do I ensure that the environment variable NODE_ENV is set?
When you issue the command su user you will switch to the user without loading their entire profile. Only the $HOME, $SHELL, $USER, and $LOGNAME variables are loaded. In order to load the user's entire profile when switching to it you have to specify that you are logging in the the user by using the --login flag, which has a shortcut as a single dash (-) after su, so your command will look like su - user.
/etc/sudoers.d/envkeep file if possible.
You will have to add env_keep += "NODE_ENV" to a file in /etc/sudoers.d/. I would recommend doing it as follows:
sudo -i to have a root shell in case something goes wrong (I messed this up one time and it was really annoying to fix).sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/envkeepDefaults env_keep += "NODE_ENV"sudo -i. It should work and put you in a shell where NODE_ENV should have been preserved.