Implement .xsessionrc on Raspbian

Posted on

A script within /etc/X11/Xsession.d called 75source-profile causes any changes to the $PATH made inside $HOME/.xsessionrc to be lost, as it reads $HOME/.profile after the $PATH is altered.

The correct way to deal with this is to rename  or copy the 40×11-common_xsessionrc to a file with higher serial number that will run after the 75, for instance 80×11-common_xsessionrc and implement any changes to the $PATH within $HOME/.xsessionrc, thus:

for UBIN in $HOME/bin $HOME/.local/bin; do {
  [ -d "$UBIN" ] && export PATH=$UBIN:$PATH
}; done

This will ensure that if any of the directories $HOME/bin and $HOME/.local/bin exist will be appended in the beginning of the $PATH

Furthermore, to avoid duplication of those directories in the $PATH, it is necessary to edit $HOME/.profile and comment out the section that reads:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin directories
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ]; then
  PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
fi

Like this:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin directories
#if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ]; then
#  PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
#fi

Finally, edit $HOME/.bashrc and add the following at the end:

for UBIN in $HOME/bin $HOME/.local/bin; do {
 [[ -d $UBIN ]] \
 && [[ ! $PATH =~ $UBIN ]] \
 && PATH=$binDir:$PATH
}; done

That’s it! Congratulations, now you have a properly configured user environment on your Raspbian system!