How do I make tramp+eshell use my environment customized in the remote ~/.bash_profile

Question

I have set up custom $PATH in my ~/.bash_profile on a remote machine (for programs installed user-locally by nix and cabal).

I use eshell and tramp to issue commands on the remote machine (cd /remotehost:somedir; then commands). (I chose this method instead of the common SSH-sessions in a terminal primarily because I'm using a bad connection and SSH-sessions get interrupted very often, so I can't count on being able to login, cd, and issue a command before the connection is interrupted.)

Unfortunately, my custom PATH is not honored in this situation, and some of the programs are not found.

What would be the nicest way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

This question has been already answered by rekado (thanks!) (as a reply to another more general question about eshell):

You can configure TRAMP to respect the PATH variable on the remote machine (for remote eshell sessions) by adding 'tramp-own-remote-path to the list 'tramp-remote-path:

(add-to-list 'tramp-remote-path 'tramp-own-remote-path)

By default, eshell will not adopt the remote PATH settings.

As for other environment variables, there is no special approach as for PATH: one can set them through tramp-remote-process-environment (as documented in https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Remote-processes.html):

(add-to-list 'tramp-remote-process-environment
              (format "DISPLAY=%s" (getenv "DISPLAY")))

and I don't know of a way that would read the ones set in the remote ~/.bash_profile. So you need to repeat them in this variable on the local side in Emacs as a workaround, which is not totally convenient because different remote hosts might need different values.

As for EDITOR specifically, of course, doing it with with-editor would be more convenient and appropriate.