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In order to load .DLLs (under Windows) or .SOs (under Linux) we must use the environment variables PATH (Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux).

The only way we could find to properly use DLLs and SOs was to define the environment variables before starting Netbeans.

  1. Is there a way to specify those environment variables inside Netbeans?
  2. Is it possible to specify it inside the project properties? That way each project could have its own definitions.
  3. is there a way to just append to those environment variables instead of just overriding them?

Background: we are developing a Java program that uses JNI to access native libraries. Those native libraries, in turn, access other dependent native libraries. Because of that, just setting the property "java.library.path" doesn't work, as we need to set the full LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or regular PATH in the case of Windows), too.

Outside Netbeans the application runs fine, because we set the environment variables inside shell scripts.

We don't want to just place the DLLs or SOs in the usual system directories because we don't want to mess up with the operating system installation during development. In addition, we want to have the flexibility to allow any developer to simply get the project from source control (Mercurial) and have all relative paths just working.

There is already a hack on stack overflow to set environment variables programmatically in Java. However, we are looking for less hackish a solution.

Community
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Luis Soeiro
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1 Answers1

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You can override Ant script tasks that NetBeans uses in build.xml file (or edit it directly in the full script in nbproject/build-impl.xml, but not recommended).

The java task is used on run target. You can use env parameter to specify environment variables to the process that will run the JVM.

Jean Waghetti
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