How to set environment variables on Mac OS X

In Mac OS X, you can set the environment variables in one of the following files :

~/.bashrc
~/.bash_profile
~/.profile

By default, Mac OS X does not has above files, you need to create it manually.

$PATH example

This example shows you how to set “mongodb/bin” folder to the existing $PATH environment variable.

$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
 
$ mongo -version
-bash: mongo: command not found
 
$cd ~
$pwd
/Users/mkyong
$touch .bash_profile
$vim .bash_profile
 
export MONGO_PATH=~/mongodb
export PATH=$PATH:$MONGO_PATH/bin
 
##restart your terminal
$ mongo -version
MongoDB shell version: 2.0.7
 
$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Users/mkyong/mongodb/bin