Why can't Groovy find this program even though it's on my PATH?

Question

tl;dr: Groovy cannot find a program ( phantomjs , which is on my $PATH ) when I attempt to execute the shell command from a class -- it's otherwise finds it just fine from the Groovy Console or from a Grails CLI script. What gives?

We have a Grails script to execute JavaScript unit tests in PhantomJS ("the headless WebKit"). When these tests are executed in a stand-alone script (call it grails test-js ) things work just fine. The relevant line from the Grails/Gant script was:

// where 'jsTests' is a List with the paths to each test
def failures = 0
jsTests.each {
  Process p = "phantomjs lib/phantom-jasmine/lib/run_jasmine_test.coffee file://${it}".execute()
  failures += p.exitValue()
}

But since we want this to run as part of the usual grails test-app cycle, we created an implementation of org.codehaus.groovy.grails.test.GrailsTestType . When we get to the part in that implementation where we need to execute the tests, that same code (as above) doesn't work, and Groovy/Grails complains that:

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "phantomjs": error=2, No such file or directory

My first thought was that phantomjs was not on my $PATH -- but I know that it is, and again: it worked when run from the Grails/Gant script. So I tried it in the Groovy Console, and it works OK from there.

Now, if I switch from phantomjs to /absolute/path/to/phantomjs , then it works fine. But hard-coding an absolute filesystem path into the class cannot be the solution.

So: why isn't Groovy finding phantomjs under those circumstances?

Update: I suspect that this might have something to do with my IDE (IntelliJ Idea), as this error doesn't appear to be happening when running this from the command line.

Answer 1

As it turns out, this had everything to do with trying to run the tests from within my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) and, more specifically, trying to do this on an OS X machine.

The solution was to add phantomjs to my PATH using launchd.conf . I...

1. created /etc/launchd.conf

2. added the following line to it: (note: I installed PhantomJS with Homebrew )

   setenv PATH /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

3. restarted my machine so that the new launchd config would take effect.
4. went back into my IDE and re-ran the tests.

And all the tests ran successfully.

Answer 2

You can try printing your path with groovy

['sh', '-c', 'echo $PATH' ].execute().text

or

println System.getenv('PATH')

You can to create an environment variable with absolute path to phantomjs and verify it in runtime and to alert if it is not properly configured.